by Lucia Berlin
Their mother had never forgiven Sally for marrying a Mexican, had refused to meet her children, left her money to Dolores. Dolores insisted upon dividing the inheritance, but it didn’t lessen the insult.
Dolores rocked Sally as they sat on the sand. The sun had set.
“She’s gone, Sally. She was sick, afraid. She lashed out, like a wounded … hyena. You’re lucky you didn’t see her. I saw her. I called her to say we were taking Daddy to the hospital by ambulance. You know what she said? ‘Could you stop and pick up some bananas?’”
“Today is my last day!” Sally said to Mrs. Wacher. “We’re going to the island. Have you ever been?”
“Oh, yes, we went with the Lewises a few days ago. It’s perfectly lovely. You’re going snorkeling?”
“Scuba,” Dolores said. “Vamos, Sally, the car is waiting.”
“I’m not going scuba diving. That’s it,” Sally said on the way to Ixtapa.
“You’ll see. Wait until you meet César. I lived with him awhile, twenty-five, thirty years ago. He was just a diver then, a fisherman.”
He had become famous and rich since then, the Jacques Cousteau of Mexico, with many movies, television programs. This was hard for Dolores to imagine. She remembered his old wooden boat, the sand floor of his palapa, their hammock.
“He was a maestro even then,” she said. “Nobody knows the ocean like he does. His press releases call him Neptune, and that sounds pretty corny… but it’s true. He probably won’t remember me, but I still want you to meet him.”
He was an old man now, with a long white beard, flowing white hair. Of course he remembered Dolores. Sweet his kiss on her eyelids, his embrace. She remembered his calloused, scarred hands on her skin….He led them to a table on the veranda. Two men from the Tourist Bureau were drinking tequila, fanning themselves with their straw hats, their guayaberas damp and wrinkled.
The vast veranda faced the ocean, but mango and avocado trees totally blocked the ocean from sight.
“How can you cover up such a view of the ocean?” Sally asked.
César shrugged, “Pues, I’ve seen it.”
He told them all about dives he and Dolores had been on years ago. The time with the sharks, the giant peine, the day Flaco drowned. How the divers used to call her “La Brava.” But she scarcely heard his praise of her. She heard him say, “When she was young she was a beautiful woman.”
“So, have you come to dive with me?” he asked, holding her hands. She longed to dive; she couldn’t bear to tell him she was afraid the regulator would break her false teeth.
“No. My back is bad now. I brought my sister to dive with you.”
“Lista?” he asked Sally. She was drinking tequila, basking in the compliments and flirtations from the men. The men left. Cesar, Sally and Dolores set out in a canoe to La Isla. Sally gripped the side of the boat, ashen with fear. At one point she leaned over the side, vomiting.
“Are you sure she should dive?” Cesar asked Dolores.
“I’m sure.”
They smiled at each other. The years were erased, their communication still there. She had once said wryly that he had been perfect. He couldn’t read or write and most of their romance was underwater, where there were no words. There had never been any need for explanations.
Quietly he showed the basics of diving to Sally. At first, out in the shallow water, Sally was still shaking with fear. Dolores sat on the rocks and watched, watched him clean her mask with spit, explain the regulator. He put the tank on her back. Dolores saw Sally stiffen, afraid he would notice her breast, but then she saw Sally unbend, swaying in rhythm before him as he reassured her, fastened her gear and stroked her, soothed her down into the water.
It took four tries. Sally surfaced, choking. No, no it was impossible, she was claustrophobic, couldn’t breathe! But he continued to speak softly to her, to coax her, smooth her with his hands. Dolores felt a sick wave of jealousy when he held her sister’s head in his hands, smiling into her eyes through their masks. She remembered his smile through the glass.
This was your big idea, she told herself. She tried to be calm, gazing out at the undulating green waves where her sister and César had disappeared. She tried to concentrate upon her sister’s pleasure. For she knew it would be pleasure. But all she could feel was regret and remorse, unspeakable loss.
It seemed like hours before they surfaced. Sally was laughing; her laughter was that of a young girl. Impetuously she was kissing and hugging César while he undid her tanks, took off her flippers.
In the diver’s hut she embraced Dolores, too. “You knew how great it would be! I flew! The ocean went on forever! Dolores, I felt so alive and strong! I was an Amazon!”
Dolores wanted to point out that Amazons had only one breast, but she bit her tongue. She and César smiled as Sally continued to talk about the beauty of the dive. She’d come back, soon, spend a week diving! Oh, the coral and the anemones, the colors, the brilliant schools of fish.
César asked them to lunch. It was three o’clock. “I’m afraid I need a siesta,” Dolores said. Sally was disappointed.
“You’ll be back, Sally. I just showed you the way.”
“Thank you both,” Sally said. Her joy and gratitude were pure, innocent. César and her sister kissed her glowing cheeks.
They were at the cab stand on the beach. César held Dolores’s hand tightly. “So, mi vieja, will you ever come back?” She shook her head.
“Stay with me tonight.”
“No puedo.”
César kissed her lips. She tasted the desire and salt of their past. The last night she had spent with him he had bitten all her fingernails to the quick. “Think of me,” he said.
Sally talked excitedly all the way into town, an hour’s drive. How vital she had felt, how free.
“I knew you would like that part. Your body disappears, because you are so weightless, but at the same time you become intensely aware of it.”
“He is wonderful. Wonderful. I can just imagine having a love affair with him! You are so lucky!”
“Can you imagine, Sally. That whole stretch of beach, where the Club Med is? It was pure empty beach. Up in the jungle there was an artesian well. There were deer, almost tame. We spent days there without seeing another soul. And the island. It was just an island, wild jungle. No dive shops or restaurants. Not a single other boat but ours. Can you imagine?”
No. She couldn’t.
“It’s uncanny,” Mrs. Wacher said, as the sisters got down from their cab. “It’s as if they have totally reversed roles. Now the younger one is absolutely gorgeous and radiant and the other is haggard and disheveled. Look at her… she who never used to have a hair out of place!”
The night was stormy. Black clouds swept across the full moon so that the beach was bright and then dark, like a hotel room with a neon sign blinking outside. Sally’s face shone like a child’s when the moonlight lit her.
“But did Mama never, ever, speak of me?”
No, matter of fact. Except to mock your sweetness, to say your docility proved that you were a fool.
“Yes, she did, a lot,” Dolores lied. “One of her favorite memories of you was how you loved that Dr. Bunny book. You would pretend to read it, turning the pages, real serious. And you got every word perfect, except when Dr. Bunny would say, ‘Case dismissed!’ you said ‘Smith to Smith!’”
“I remember that book! The rabbits were all furry!”
“At first. But you wore the fur out petting them. She liked to remember you and that red wagon, too, when you were around four. You’d put Billy Jameson in the wagon, and all your dolls, and Mabel, the dog, and the two cats, and then you’d say ‘All aboard!’ but the cats and dog would have gotten out and Billy too, and the dolls fell out. You’d spend all morning packing them up and saying all aboard.”
“I don’t remember that at all.”
“Oh, I do, it was in the path by Daddy’s hyacinths, and the climbing rose by the gate. Can you remember
the smell?”
“Yes!”
“She used to ask me if I remembered you in Chile, going off to school on your bicycle. Every single morning you’d look up to the hall window and wave, and your straw hat would fly off.”
Sally laughed. “True. I remember. But, Dolores, it was you in the hall window. You I was waving goodbye to.”
True. “Well, I guess she used to see you from the window by her bed.”
“Silly how good that makes me feel. I mean even if she didn’t ever say goodbye. That she even watched me go off to school. I’m so glad you told me about that.”
“Good,” Dolores whispered, to herself. The sky was black now and huge raindrops were falling cold. The sisters ran together in the rain to their room.
Sally’s plane left the next morning; Dolores would leave the following day. At breakfast, before she left, Sally said goodbye to everyone, thanked the waiters, thanked Mrs. Lewis and Mrs. Wacher for being so kind.
“We’re glad that you two had such a good visit. What a comfort to have a sister!” Mrs. Lewis said.
“It really is a comfort,” Sally said when she kissed Dolores goodbye at the airport.
“We’re just beginning to know each other,” Dolores said. “We will be there now, always, for each other.” Her heart ached to see the sweetness, the trust in her sister’s eyes.
On the way back to the hotel she had the cab stop at a liquor store. In her room she drank and she slept and then she sent out for another bottle. In the morning, on the way to her plane for California she bought a half-pint of rum, to cure her shakes and headache. By the time the taxi reached the airport she was, like they say, feeling no pain.
Daughters
The courage of my own convictions? I can’t even hold a perception for longer than five minutes. Just like the radio in a pick-up truck. I’ll be barreling along …Waylon Jennings, Stevie Wonder… hit a cattleguard & bang it’s a preacher from Clint, Texas. Your laff is trash. Laugh? Life? From one day to the next the 40 bus alters. Some days there will be people on it from Chaucer, Damon Runyon. A Breughel feast. I feel close to them all, at one with them. We are a vivid tapestry of riders, then there is an epidemic of Giles de la Tourette syndrome and we’re all victims, trapped in a steamy capsule, forever. Sometimes everyone is tired. Whole bus plumb wore out. Heavy shopping bags. Cumbersome carts, strollers. Panting up the steps, sleeping past their stops, the people slump, they sway limp from the poles like languorous seaweed. Or everyone has growth on their heads. Row after row, and standing, packed, they all have hair growing out of their heads. Not green willow or eucalyptus or moss but a billion strands, filaments of hair. Punk hair, blue lady hair, wet afro hair. Ach, the man in front of me has no hair at all. He doesn’t even have any tiny little holes in his head for it to come out of. I feel faint. A little girl gets on the bus, wearing a St. Ignatius uniform. Someone, a grandmother hold still now child has plaited her hair into braids so tight her eyes slant. The braids are tied with white bows, real satin ribbons. She sits behind the driver. The morning sun gleams on her perfect part, makes a halo behind her head. I love the child’s hair. I touch my own, pat my own hair which is short and rough, like a Samoyed’s or a Chow’s. Good boy. Kill, white fang.
I should have taken that job stringing graduated pearls. Working for a doctor, well it’s life or death all day long. I glide around, a real angel of mercy. Or a ghoul. Mmmm, Dr. B … interesting, these bone marrow results on Mr. Morbido. That’s his name, honest. Truth is weirder than my imagination which really goes berserk with the dialysis machines. Breakthroughs in modern medicine. Life savers that by late afternoon turn into headless plastic vampires, draining blood away. The patients get paler and paler. The machines make a humming sucking sound with an occasional slurp that sounds like a laugh.
By late afternoon I’m ready to strangle Riva Chirenko’s daughter. I don’t know her name. Nobody calls her Mrs. Tomanovich. She’s Mr. Tomanovich’s wife. Riva’s daughter. Irena Tomanovich’s mother. She’s what’s wrong with all us women, that schleppe from the steppe. But at other times it is this same woman, Riva Chirenko’s daughter, that I respect, revere. If I could only accept as she has done, just accept. Acceptance is faith, Henry Miller said. I could strangle him, too.
Yesterday was the Christmas party at the dialysis center. No matter how I look at it, it was a lovely party, a celebration. All the patients and their families. Rockie Robinson came. Nobody had seen him since he got a cadaver transplant, and he was looking good. There is a bond between dialysis patients, like with people in AA or earthquake survivors. They are conscious of a reprieve, treat one another with more tenderness & respect than ordinary people do.
I was busy with the buffet and the punch. It was good, tons of food. No added salt. Mr. Tomanovich, Riva Chirenko’s son-in-law, was a help, standing at the head of the table hailing all the guests. Food good! Drink good!
It was a lot healthier when I used to see people as animals. Mr. Tomanovich a sweaty manatee. Now they are all diseases. Shingles or toxic shock. Mr. Tomanovich is hypertensive, for sure, with his red face and sweaty sickles around his powder blue underarms. Potential glomerulosclerosis and renal failure. His wife, Riva Chirenko’s daughter, the yak…a hysterectomy in store for her, her pain is of the womb.
Riva Chirenko herself is beyond disease. You always hear about little old ladies. The big old ladies die, that’s why, except for Riva who is 280 pounds and 80 years old. Folds of red velvet spill over the plastic of her gurney. Red blood hums away. IVs drip steadily into the mesas on her arms. She looks like Father Christmas. White hair and eyebrows, rosy cheeks, white hair sprouting from her chin. She barks in Russian at her daughter, who fans her, soothes her brow with a cool cloth, sings to her in Russian in a mournful voice. Back and forth from the dining room, filling her red plate each time with morsels for her mother. Swedish meatballs, croissants with ham, roast beef, deviled eggs, asparagus, quiche, brie, olives, onion dip, pumpkin pie, champagne, cranberry juice, coffee. It all just quietly disappears into Riva Chirenko’s amazingly tiny and pretty mouth.
“Where’s Dr. B.?” Mr. Tomanovich keeps asking. I have worked for him for two years and I never know where he is. Is he in fact declotting a Scribner’s shunt? Taking a nap? Sitting shiva? “He’s in surgery,” I say.
Riva Chirenko’s daughter, each time she fills her mother’s plate, touches Irena’s, her own daughter’s, hair and encourages her to eat. She says, in Russian, “Kushai, dochka.” Irena’s father too, comes over from time to time and says,
“Tebe nekhorosho?”
They are saying, “Shape up, you little slut!” No, of course not. They are saying, “Eat, my little princess.”
The daughter, Irena, sits on the only chair in the dining room. An ugly plastic chair, all wrong. I want to throw it out, go rent her another one, buy one, quick. Her profile, with a long neck, is curved like an albino dinosaur, a marble cobra, an anorexic whippet. See, I’m sick. I make her sound grotesque. She is the most lovely creature I have ever seen. Pale green eyes, hair like white honey, like the inside of a pear. She is fourteen, in white, wearing the now-fashionable lace gloves with no fingers. Her bony hands lie in her lap like the little white birds you eat whole in Guadalajara… too much cinnamon. She wears white lace stockings with no feet. Pulsating blue traceries on her ankles. Her mother touches her pale hair. Irena flinches, does not acknowledge her mother at all. When her father does the same thing she doesn’t speak to him, but she bares her exquisite white teeth.
Dr. B. finally arrives. There is an uproar. Patients and their families flock around him. They adore him. He looks tired. Mr. Tomanovich gets his wife to translate. He has been waiting to show Dr. B. photographs of Irena in Hawaii. Irena had won the Skagg’s Drugstore Father’s Day Contest. An essay: “My Dad is the Greatest!” A trip to Hawaii for her and her parents. Of course her mother couldn’t leave Riva Chirenko. Irena had entered the Skagg’s Mother’s Day essay contest too but she had only won honorable men
tion and the polaroid that took all the pictures. Irena by a Bird of Paradise. Irena wearing a lei, in a sugarcane field, on the terrace. No beach. She hates the sun.
Dr. B. smiles. “You are fortunate to have such a talented and pretty child.”
“God is good!” Riva Chirenko’s daughter is always saying that. God brought them from Russia. God gave her mother the dialysis machine.
Dr. B. looks at Irena, sitting there, head high, scornful. Snow flakes flutter down. She raises her tiny white hand, for him to shake, kiss? It curves in the air, poised, curved. She turns into an Egyptian frieze. Dr. B. stares at her. He is transfixed.
“Have you eaten?” he asks. For God’s sake. That kid hasn’t eaten for years. Dr. B. goes to greet patients and guests. Irena turns her extended hand into a point toward the cloakroom. Mr. Tomanovich rushes to get her fur-trimmed coat, puts it on her. Her mother comes, buttons up the coat, frees her hair from the fur, strokes Irena’s hair. Irena doesn’t flinch, doesn’t speak. She turns to leave. Her father touches the small of her back. She freezes and stops. He removes his hand and opens the door, following her out.
I clean up the dining room. Most of the guests have left, were leaving. The dialysis patients still have another hour on their run. Some are vomiting, some are asleep. The tape plays “Away in a manger, no crib for His bed.” My own grandmother’s favorite carol, but it used to scare me because she always told me not to be a dog in the manger. I thought the dog had eaten baby Jesus.
The food had been just right. Nothing is left except two large tupperware bowls that Anna Ferraza brought. A real flop. Strawberry jello & cranberries, bitter as a bog. I leave it there. The color is pretty by the red plates, the poinsettia.
There are only a few nurses and techs left. Dr. B. is on the phone in his office. The Christmas tree in the middle of the big room has hundreds of bubble lights that gurgle and flow louder than the Cobe II machines and it’s as if they are transfusing the tree. You can smell the green pine of the tree. Riva Chirenko’s daughter still fans Riva even though she is asleep. Finally she stops, stands. She is stiff and sore. Osteoporosis. Post-menopausal bone loss. She covers Riva with a soft shawl, comes into the dining room just as I’m leaving with a bag full of garbage. I realize that Riva Chirenko’s daughter has not had dinner. She kisses my cheek. “Thank you for the party! Merry Christmas!” Her eyes are green like her daughter’s. Joyous eyes. Not the sappy smile of abused children or religious fanatics. Joyous.