by Lucia Berlin
The porter came in. He was tiny but frightening because I had never seen black people before. Come along to bed, now, miss, never you mind.
In the morning you were smiling. Blue baby eyes. Now they are green, the color of Oaxacan jade. Clear open eyes, always trusting. You never expected anything to go wrong. I always did. When I woke up, on the train, there was Mama all fresh and combed and putting on lipstick. Look at the pretty cows! Moo-cows, Sally!
No tourists on this flight. Mexican families with videos, walkmans, microwaves. The pilot speaks over the loudspeaker, not to tell us the location or altitude but to say he’s turning off the lights for a while. Please, everybody, go look at the sunset on the right side of the aircraft. Blazing reds, magentas, streaks of ocher yellow in swirls of clouds. Everyone rushes to the right side of the plane. Except me, I’m afraid it will tip.
The movie Big goes back on and the stewardesses, charming and festive now, pass cheese and fruit, champagne. You can still smoke on Mexican planes so I smoke and smoke. Sally, I am surprised by the pain of losing you, by the gash of it. The movie goes off again, the pilot says he’s turning out the lights once more. Please, immediately, look at the moon to the left of the plane! A full orange moon rises over the mountains above Puerto Vallarta. He forgets to turn the movie or the lights back on. We fly along, silent in the dark, looking at the moon as the plane begins the descent into Mexico City. Flaps down. The plane cuts through a thick tarpaulin of smog and fecal dust and the dazzle of the city explodes for miles around us. The plane thuds and bounces careening into a terrifying landing. Passengers and two stewardesses make the sign of the cross.
Will someone meet me? Do I take a cab? A long wait for the luggage. Sheets, feather pillows, presents for Sally’s children. Two very expensive wigs for Sally’s bald head. Your red curling hair. Admit it, this must be awful, awful, to lose your lovely hair. At last the bags arrive. A mozo loads them onto a cart and runs toward the exit. I run after him, think he’s stealing them. I can’t breathe, the high altitude, the acrid smell. We rush past customs. The mozo drops the bags, grabs my tip and keeps on running.
Inside the barrier is my sister. But Sally, it is just like you as a child, your tiny head in a cap like a baby hat. Small, you got so small but your eyes are wide and green. A horrible grimace of terror upon your face. The surly man next to you wears the same expression. But everyone is running now and you are both screaming at me. I kick the bags along the floor. My back…I can’t carry them. Screaming, screaming. The man comes for the bags, but drops them.
The airport is on fire! I’ll get the car. Run!
We wrap shawls around our faces. You pick up the heaviest two suitcases and trot clumsily ahead of me. You turn once to see if I’m following. Sweat pours from your bony face. How can you be so strong? My chest aches, I can’t breathe, running after you. Tendrils of green smoke slide around our necks. Two women collapse onto the marble floor. A boy grabs at the bag I carry. I kick him away. Smoke is yellow-black, blinding. All the lights go out. I have lost you. I run, sobbing; I see your skull. Your cap has gone and you sit on the bags like a sleepy baby. Your head shines pink, new. You are across the avenida, crumpled onto the curb. A policeman tries to make you move. You can’t move. Another boy tries to get the bag you sit on. Vayase, pendejo! You smile at me. Did we save the wigs? Police are making everyone run to safety. No, too dangerous to get to parking. Airplane tanks might explode any minutes. Your ex-husband is in the President’s cabinet; his car will surely get through. Yellow flares cascade on the divider. Ambulances are loading people who have been trampled, who have fallen from the fumes.
It is bright now because of the bursts of gay yellow flames and flashing red lights. Gusts of unbearably hot air sweep at us. Except for the sirens it is eerily still. A rustle of fire, quiet, thickening vines of smoke.
The Mercedes-Benz appears, flags flying. The policeman notices that you are very ill, lifts you into the air. Just folds you all up and puts you in. The crowd, their faces covered, stare at the lone limousine, the two laughing women. We speed away, the car buckles and spins from the impact of the explosion behind us. Ghastly yellow green pulsations, belches of fire.
Señora, are you all right? the chauffeur asks.
I’m frightened. We are frightened!
Fíjese, no más … the sirens are all going the other way!
The car glides down the periferico, going 100. Neon lights dart past like underwater fish through the black windows. Muted cacophony of sirens as ambulances pass us on both sides.
Carlotta, we have had so many adventures! you say.
Dangers!
The ship off Panama.
Grandpa.
Grandpa!
The biplane was the worst, in Chile. Through those ravines in an open cockpit. God, we are old. That plane was made of paper!
Canvas. He was handsome, remember? What a death!
Shortly after, the pilot crashed the same plane into the side of the Andes above Santiago. The burnt outline of the aircraft stood out clearly against the mountain until the rains finally came and grass grew to cover it.
Carlotta …We only met him for half an hour, but you stared out the window at that plane print and sobbed for at least six months!
I wasn’t crying for him, Sally. It was the imprint of the plane. God, she never understands anything, really.
You are holding my hand with yours. I don’t know your hands now. I kiss you softly.
Carlotta, isn’t this a wonderful car? Air-tight, sound-proof, bulletproof. I want to be buried in it.
I don’t like it much. Weird to be in Mexico and not be able to smell it. Seriously though, I’ve thought about this coffin problem. Mexicans adore plastic. Tupperware coffins! All sizes. I could make a killing.
You enclose me in a brittle embrace, a carapace.
I knew you would come and make me laugh.
We always laugh. It’s a family tic. This isn’t funny, Sally. Please, let’s don’t laugh now.
I have said the right thing. You sigh and let go, sinking back into the velvet, your face slack-jawed with exhaustion. Your eyes look into mine.
Whatever will you do without me?
What will I do? A sick moan surges up from my body into a cry. And Sally, you always copy everything I do. You cry out too. The unison of our wail comes from far away, deep, from where we first knew one another.
The limousine speeds on, cool and silent, down Avenida de Los Insurgentes. My sister and I fall asleep.
Melina
In Albuquerque, in the evening, my husband Rex would go to class at the university or to his sculpture studio. I took Ben, the baby, for long walks in his stroller. Up the hill, on a street leafy with elm trees was Clyde Tingley’s house. We always went past that house. Clyde Tingley was a millionaire who gave all his money to children’s hospitals in the state. We went by his house because not just at Christmas but all the time he had Christmas tree lights strung up, all over the porch and on all the trees. He would turn them on just as it was dusk, as we were on the way home. Sometimes he would be in his wheelchair on the porch, a skinny old man who would holler “Hello” and “Lovely evening” to us as we passed. One night though he yelled at me “Stop! Stop! Something wrong with that there child’s feet! Need to be seen to.”
I looked down at Ben’s feet, which were fine.
“No, it’s because he’s too big for the stroller now. He’s just holding them up funny so they won’t drag on the ground.”
Ben was so smart. He didn’t even talk yet but he seemed to understand. He set his feet squarely on the ground, as if to show the old man they were ok.
“Mothers never want to admit there’s any problem. You take him to a doctor now.”
Just then a man dressed all in black walked up. Even then you rarely saw people out walking so he was a surprise. He was squatting on the sidewalk holding Ben’s feet in his hands. A saxophone strap dangled from his neck and Ben grabbed at it.
“No
, sir. Nothing wrong with this boy’s feet,” he said.
“Well, I’m glad to hear it,” Clyde Tingley called.
“Thanks, anyway,” I said.
The man and I stood there talking, and then he walked us home. This happened in 1956; he was the first beatnik I ever met. There hadn’t been anyone like him that I had seen in Albuquerque. Jewish, with a Brooklyn accent. Long hair and a beard, dark glasses. But he didn’t seem sinister. Ben liked him right away. His name was Beau. He was a poet and a musician, played saxophone. It was later I found out that it was a saxophone strap hanging from his neck.
We became friends right away. He played with the baby while I made iced tea. After I put Ben to bed we sat outside on the porch steps talking until Rex came home. The two men were polite to each other but didn’t get along too well, I could see that right away. Rex was a graduate student. We were really poor then, but Rex seemed like someone older and powerful. An air of success, maybe a little conceit. Beau acted like he didn’t much care about anything, which I already knew wasn’t true. After he left Rex said he didn’t like the idea of me dragging home stray hep-cats.
Beau was hitchhiking his way home to New York… the Apple … after six months in San Francisco. He was staying with friends, but they worked all day, so he came to see me and Ben every day, the four days he was there.
Beau really needed to talk. It was wonderful for me to hear somebody talk, besides Ben’s few words, so I was glad to see him. Besides, he talked about romance. He had fallen in love. Now I knew that Rex loved me, and we were happy, would have a happy life together, but he wasn’t madly in love with me the way Beau was with Melina.
Beau had been a sandwich man in San Francisco. He had a little cart with sweet rolls and coffee, soft drinks and sandwiches. He pushed it up and down the floors of a gigantic office building. One day he had pulled his cart into an insurance office and he saw her. Melina. She was filing, but not really filing, looking out the window with a dreamy smile on her face. She had long dyed blonde hair and wore a black dress. She was very tiny and thin. But it was her skin, he said. It was like she wasn’t a person at all but some creature made of white silk, of milk glass.
Beau didn’t know what came over him. He left the cart and his customers, went through a little gate over to where she stood. He told her he loved her. I want you, he said. I’ll get the bathroom key. Come on. It will just take five minutes. Melina looked at him and said, I’ll be right there.
I was pretty young then. This was the most romantic thing I had ever heard.
Melina was married and had a baby girl about a year old. Ben’s age. Her husband was a trumpet player. He was on the road for the two months Beau knew Melina. They had a passionate affair and when her husband was coming home she said to Beau, “Time to hit the road.” So he did.
Beau said you had to do anything she said, that she cast a spell on him, on her husband, on any man who knew her. You couldn’t get jealous, he said, because it seemed perfectly natural that any other man would love her.
For example … the baby wasn’t even her husband’s. For a while they had been living in El Paso. Melina worked at Piggly Wiggly packing meat and chickens and sealing them in plastic. Behind a glass window, in a funny paper hat. But still this Mexican bullfighter who was buying steaks saw her. He banged on the counter and rang a bell, insisted to the butcher that he see the wrapping woman. He made her leave work. That’s how she affected you, Beau said. You had to be near her immediately.
A few months later Melina realized she was pregnant. She was really happy, and told her husband. He was furious. You can’t be, he said, I had a vasectomy. What? Melina was indignant. And you married me without telling me this? She kicked him out of the house, changed the locks. He sent flowers, wrote her passionate letters. He camped out outside the door until at last she forgave him for what he did.
She sewed all their clothes. She had covered all the rooms in the apartment with fabric. There were mattresses and pillows on the floors so you crawled, like a baby, from tent to tent. In candlelight day and night you never knew what time it was.
Beau told me everything about Melina. About her childhood in foster homes, how she ran away at thirteen. She was a B-girl in a bar (I’m not sure what that is) and her husband had rescued her from a very ugly situation. She’s tough, Beau said, she talks nasty. But her eyes, her touch, they are like an angel child’s. She was this angel that just came into my life and ruined it forever… He did get dramatic about her, and even cried and cried sometimes, but I loved hearing all about her, wished I could be like her. Tough, mysterious, beautiful.
I was sorry when Beau left. He was like an angel in my life, too. When he was gone I realized how little Rex ever talked to me or Ben. I felt so lonely I even thought about turning our rooms into tents.
A few years later I was married to a different man, a jazz piano player named David. He was a good man but he was quiet too. I don’t know why I married those quiet guys, when the thing I like best in the world to do is to talk. We had a lot of friends though. Musicians coming into town would stay with us and while the men played we women cooked and talked and lay around on the grass playing with the kids.
It was like pulling teeth to get David to tell me what he was like in first grade, or about his first girlfriend, anything. I knew he had lived with a woman, a beautiful painter, for five years, but he didn’t want to talk about her. Hey, I said, I’ve told you my whole life story, tell me something about you, tell me when you first fell in love … He laughed then, but he actually told me. That’s easy, he said.
It was a woman who was living with his best friend, a bass player, Ernie Jones. Down in the south valley, by the irrigation ditch. Once he had gone to see Ernie and when he wasn’t home he went down to the ditch.
She was sun-bathing, naked and white against the green grass. For sunglasses she wore those paper lace doilies they put under ice cream.
“So. That’s it?” I prodded.
“Well, yeah. That’s it. I fell in love.”
“But what was she like?”
“She wasn’t like anyone in this world. Once Ernie and I were lying around by the ditch, talking, smoking weed. We were real blue because we were both out of work. She was supporting us both, working as a waitress. One day she worked a noon banquet and she brought all the flowers home, a whole roomful. But what she did was carry them all upstream and dump them in the ditch. So Ernie and I were sitting there, gloomy, on the bank, staring at the muddy water and then a billion flowers floated by. She had taken food and wine, even silver and tablecloths that she set up on the grass.”
“So, did you make love with her?”
“No. I never even talked to her, alone anyway. I just—remember her—in the grass.”
“Hm,” I said, pleased by all that information and by the sort of sappy look on his face. I loved romance in any form.
We moved to Santa Fe, where David played piano at Claude’s. A lot of good musicians passed through town in those years and would sit in with David’s trio for one or two nights. Once a really good trumpet player came, Paco Duran. David liked playing with him, and asked if it was ok with me if Paco and his wife and child stayed with us for a week. Sure, I said, it will be nice.
It was. Paco played great. He and David played all night at work and together all day at home. Paco’s wife, Melina, was exotic and fun. They talked and acted like L.A. jazz musicians. Called our house a pad and said “you dig?” and “outta sight.” Their little girl and Ben got along great but were both at the age where they got into everything. We tried putting them both in a playpen but neither one of them would go for it. Melina got the idea that we should just let them carry on and she and I should get inside the playpen with our coffee and ashtrays safe. So there we were, sitting in there while the kids took books out of the bookcase. She was telling me about Las Vegas, making it sound like another planet. I realized, listening to her, not just looking at her but being surrounded by her other-worldly be
auty, that this was Beau’s Melina.
Somehow I couldn’t say anything about it. I couldn’t say Hey, you are so beautiful and weird you must be Beau’s romance. But I thought of Beau and missed him, hoped he was doing fine.
She and I cooked dinner and the men went off to work. We bathed the children and went out on the back porch, smoked and drank coffee, talked about shoes. We talked about all the important shoes in our lives. The first penny loafers, first high heels. Silver platforms. Boots we had known. Perfect pumps. Handmade sandals. Huaraches. Spike heels. While we talked our bare feet wriggled in the damp green grass by the porch. Her toenails were painted black.
She asked me what my sign was. Usually this annoyed me but I let her tell me everything about my Scorpio self and I believed every word. I told her I read palms, a little, and looked at her hands. It was too dark so I went in and got a kerosene lantern, set it on the steps between us. I held her two white hands by lantern and moonlight, and remembered what Beau had said about her skin. It was like holding cool glass, silver.
I know Cheiro’s palmistry book by heart. I have read hundreds of palms. I’m telling you this so you’ll know I did tell her things that I saw in the lines and mounds of her hands. But mostly I told her everything Beau had told me about her.
I’m ashamed of why I did this. I was jealous of her. She was so dazzling. She didn’t really do anything special, her being dazzled. I wanted to impress her.
I told her her life story. I told her about the horrible foster parents, how Paco protected her. Said things like, “I see a man. Handsome man. Danger. You are not in danger. He is in danger. A race driver, bullfighter maybe?” Fuck, she said, nobody knew about the bullfighter.
Beau had told me that once he put his hand on her head and said “It will all be all right …” and she had wept. I told her that she never ever cried, not when she was sad or mad. But that if someone was really kind and just put their hand on her head and said not to worry, that might make her cry…