by Unknown
“Technically,” Lily tells her mother now, lowering her book with forbearance, “you should have asked us before giving away our stuff.”
“Angel’s baby doesn’t have a lot of nice things. And since we do, we’re going to share.”
Angel scratches at something crusted on a miniature UNM sweatshirt, then folds it into a teensy square. She picks up a lavender pinafore and folds that, too. There are several dresses in there, Amadeo sees now, frilly floral pinks and purples. It seems Valerie just brought the whole lot of crap from her house without even bothering to go through it, as though his home were a Goodwill dumpster.
“You know she’s having a boy, right?” Amadeo cracks open another beer. He’s getting better at maneuvering around the bandages.
“I thought I’d let Angel choose from all of it.” Valerie grabs a fistful of hair and winds it over her shoulder into a long glossy rope, her old nervous gesture. “Babies don’t understand gender, Amadeo. They don’t know what they’re wearing.”
Angel’s cheek and neck are flushed, and, watching her, Amadeo is seized with an urge to defend her. “Did you even wash it?”
“No, no,” Angel insists. She won’t look at him. “It’s really nice of you, Aunt Val.” She smiles bravely across the pile.
Valerie narrows her eyes at Amadeo’s beer. “Haven’t you already had one tonight? Aren’t you on Percocet?” She points to the prescription bottle on the breakfast bar. “You have to be really careful with that stuff. I’m amazed they prescribed it to an alcoholic.”
His daughter’s lips part, pale.
“You’re lucky I never got into chiva.” His voice is louder than he intends.
“Actually,” Valerie says, consonants snipped, “you’re lucky you didn’t.”
“It’s an epidemic. You see it all over the papers. The whole county is fucked.” He glances at Angel. “Screwed.”
“Yeah, thanks, I’m aware. You’re not seriously asking me to commend you for not being a heroin addict.”
Amadeo sets down his empty can, hard. “Well, it’s not nothing.”
“Mazel tov, little brother.”
Amadeo inspects his bicep, flexes, and Valerie looks away, biting her lip.
His mother is touching tiny garments, smoothing them gently in her lap. “I had no idea you saved all this, honey.” Something in her voice makes Amadeo look at her, but she lifts her head, blinks, and smiles serenely.
“Are you scared of labor?” Valerie asks Angel, shifting on the floor, her short legs not quite crossing. “I was scared out of my mind. Both times I just wanted to give up and leave them in there.” She pulls Sarah onto her lap and says to Lily over the girl’s head, “Aren’t you glad I didn’t? I’d have to open a middle school in my uterus.”
“Sick.” Lily glances up just long enough to grimace, draws her knees closer to her chest, and goes back to chewing her thumbnail. Sarah wriggles away from her mother.
Angel reaches over her stomach and lays the pinafore carefully on the far side of the pile as if it’s contaminated. “I’m not that worried. I’m in my prime childbearing years. Body-wise, I mean, not society-wise. Probably labor won’t be too hard.”
“Don’t you kid yourself,” says Yolanda darkly. “I was young, too, and it hurt like heck.”
“It’s true, Gramma. Studies have shown that it’s easier for teenagers.” Angel has brightened. “My teacher, Brianna? She told us that younger girls have less C-sections. All these old ladies waiting ’til they’re forty, they’re the ones who make problems for themselves. I see them in the grocery store, looking at me all judgy, but they’re jealous.”
Valerie shoots a worried glance at Lily. “Well—”
But Angel is already telling them about her friend Lizette’s birthing experience. “It only took her an hour. She wasn’t even sure if she’d make it to the hospital before the baby slid out. Not to be gross, but she said it was like taking a crap.”
Lily sets down her book and regards her cousin with interest. “Nast.”
Angel looks at each of them, bright-eyed. “Have you heard about olive oil? Brianna invited a guest speaker about natural birth. This lady didn’t use drugs at all, just did yoga the whole time and rubbed olive oil on her junk. She didn’t even have to get snipped.”
“Snipped?” asks Amadeo faintly. When Marissa was pregnant, they didn’t talk like this, at least not in front of Amadeo. Something’s happened to society in the last sixteen years, though. Now it’s like these women just can’t stop themselves.
“The perineum,” Valerie explains. She gives Amadeo a bland smile. Revenge.
“Disgusting, right?” says Angel, warming to her subject. “’Cause if you tear, then it don’t heal right and you’re all stretched out and you won’t give good sex ever again.”
“Okay.” Amadeo giggles, high and nervous. “Stop.” He looks at his mother and sister and is surprised to see revulsion in their faces, too. Lily, on the other hand, regards her cousin with fascination. Maybe they aren’t a united front of womanhood after all.
Valerie winds her hair around her hand again and takes a deep breath. “First,” she says, pulling out her school counselor voice and preparing her air quotes, “Angel, it’s not your job to give good sex. And second—” Her fingers go motionless in the air, and Valerie glances again at her eldest daughter.
“Don’t get pregnant,” Angel tells Lily dutifully. “It’ll ruin your life.”
Lily looks insulted. “God! I would never. God.” She scoots back on the couch, away from her cousin, as if screwing up might be contagious. “I’m going to college.”
“Well, Angel might go to college, too.” But Valerie’s voice is chipper and unconvincing.
Yolanda looks at her progeny worriedly and touches her spiky new hair. “So, the cooking olive oil? Just regular stuff from the kitchen?” She shakes her head. “No, thank you very much. I want real hospital-approved stuff on my shee-shee.”
Amadeo slaps his hands over his ears. “Mom!”
“Just call it a vagina, Mother.”
Yolanda waves Valerie away, laughing. “I hate that word. It’s dirty.”
“Dirty!” cries Valerie. She leans in, her deep, disturbing cleavage tipped forward. “How can it be dirty? It’s an anatomical term. Shee-shee. Ugh.”
“Well,” says Yolanda, “I think it’s cute.” She gets up and circles around to the kitchen, where she begins banging pots, spooning food into serving dishes, opening and closing the oven door. Crisp golden potatoes fragrant with rosemary, the salty ham. Amadeo’s mouth waters. He’s starving, he realizes. It’s been almost two weeks since he’s had a real meal, unless you count Angel’s bizarre food combos, and Amadeo doesn’t.
“Cute! It is a part of a human body, and it does a hell of a lot of work. Just because it’s on a woman we should devalue it, make it cute?”
“Mom,” says Lily. “Stop.”
“It is not cute,” says Angel, pushing herself up. She starts to set the table. “It’s gross. But anyways, what I was saying. This guest speaker didn’t feel any pain because she self-hypnotized herself and breathed right through it. Did it all in a horse trough right in her living room.” She arranges silverware on folded paper napkins.
Panic rises in Amadeo’s chest. “Don’t do that, Angel. You gotta be in a hospital.”
“Obviously I’m going to be in a hospital.” For the first time this evening Angel looks him full in the face. “You think I’m going to give birth here? With you as my breathing coach? No thanks, Captain Hook. I want professionals.” She pats her stomach. “Only the best for you, baby.” Now her tone is without malice. She resumes placing the dishes around the table, bored, apparently, by her own anger.
Valerie tips her head. “Good for you, Angelica, sticking with your program. It’ll make going back to school so much easier.”
“I didn’t even know I liked school,” says Angel. “But now there’s a real actual point, you know? Brianna teaches us useful stuff. Maybe
all those years I wanted to be learning about baby development and how to make a good life for myself and not the history of the Constitution or whatever stuff they make us learn.”
“You can’t be a good citizen without understanding the Constitution,” Lily informs them.
“All those years,” Amadeo repeats to Valerie and his mom with a laugh. He jerks his thumb at Angel. “She talks like she’s an old lady. You’ve done one year of real high school, Angel.”
“A year and a half. Plus middle school counts.” Angel stops beside the table, holding the platter of ham. It’s pink and rich, curls of burned flesh at the edges. “I learned tons of stuff in middle school I didn’t care about. Brianna says we have to discover our passions. Like you, Lily: I watched your news clip online. You were amazing, standing up like that.”
“Brianna, Brianna, Brianna,” says Amadeo. “You in love with this lady?”
Angel thumps the ham on the table. “She’s a role model. Which, in case you can’t tell, I could use.”
Amadeo holds up his beer and realizes that he’s a little drunk. “To role models.” He throws it back and tosses the empty across the room and into the trash. He makes the shot and looks to each of them, grinning, but they’re all staring at him like he’s committed a felony.
“Do you need to belittle her experience?” Valerie asks the question sincerely.
This isn’t who he is! he wants to protest. These women are putting him on the defensive, and it isn’t his fault, it just isn’t. He’s afraid Angel will cry, clinch the case against him.
“I’m sorry.” The apology startles him, startles them all. Yolanda’s face smooths. “You’re doing great,” he tells Angel softly. Goodness swells in him, and the feeling is intoxicating. The feeling is a fuck you to Valerie.
Angel raises her head, and now her eyes fill. “Yeah?”
Amadeo isn’t seeing Valerie, isn’t seeing his mother. Just Angel. It takes so little to make her happy, and he can do it. He’ll make his daughter happy, he pledges. “Yeah,” he says. “Really great.”
AFTER A TENSE, quiet dinner, Valerie reluctantly agrees to allow her girls to watch one show, so they’re on their bellies, blank-eyed before some sitcom. They munch on the contents of the plastic Easter baskets Yolanda produced, slurping the gunk from Cadbury Creme Eggs, crunching on candy-coated chocolates, while Angel sits above them on the couch, doing her math homework.
All night his mother has been quiet, rubbing her forehead. But now, at Valerie’s urging, she retires to her own bedroom to watch her stories, while Amadeo and Valerie clean up, Valerie having volunteered for both of them. “We’ll have dessert after, then,” his mother says. “I want us to talk.”
“Fine. I’ll help, but I can’t really use my hands.” He pops a Percocet, because it’s time, and also to remind his sister of his injuries. She says nothing.
While he’s putting away leftovers, Amadeo takes the opportunity to get himself another beer. It’s number four maybe, or five. He gropes at the tab under his shirt to muffle the pop and fizz and swigs fast, blocked by the refrigerator door from Valerie’s critical eye. And because he needs to keep up his strength if he’s going to be enclosed in the kitchen with his sister, he tosses back another, placing the empties in the crisper.
“I am so impressed with Angel,” Valerie says over the running water.
“Yeah.” Amadeo wipes his mouth on his sleeve and starts scraping plates into the trash.
“She seems like she’s got a solid head on her shoulders. She’ll need that. She’s got a tough row to hoe.” Valerie laughs. “It just shows how long it’s been since I’ve seen her, but, god, she’s grown up.”
Amadeo looks over the breakfast bar at the girls in the living room. Angel seems absorbed in her homework. He is entering that stage of intoxication where everything is hazy and bearable.
“Some of the girls I work with in the schools are so unrealistic. They think being pregnant makes them special, like they’re one of these celebrity pregnant teens and should get their own shows just because they had unprotected sex. But Angel seems to be engaged in her classes and taking it all really seriously.”
Blabbity-blab-blab. The woman doesn’t stop. Her forehead is shiny with steam or sweat or both, her black sideburns damp.
“I guess she turned out pretty good.”
Valerie shuts off the water and turns to him. She pokes his chest gently with a wet finger, looking up into his face with moist earnestness. The water spreads through his T-shirt and a few tiny bubbles of dish soap collapse into the fabric. “And I’m proud of you, too, brother. You’re stepping up. I have to admit, I didn’t think you would.”
The fuzzy sense of well-being washes away completely, replaced by blurry rage. Amadeo palms his scalp and pulls it toward his shoulder, cracking his neck. First one side, then the other. “I have to admit, Valerie, I didn’t think you’d make it through tonight without being a bitch.”
Valerie steps away from him and holds up her dripping hands. “I didn’t drive all the way from Albuquerque to be verbally assaulted, Amadeo. I don’t need your hostility.”
“Why do you have to be like that, Valerie? Don’t be like that.” He gathers more plates from the table.
“Like what? I just said a nice thing. You read insult into every single comment.”
Assault, hostility, insult. Valerie buries these accusations in her speech, planting them like land mines. If Amadeo were to press on any one of them, uproot or deny it, the word would detonate, and he’d be blamed for the fallout.
Well, he wants to lean on one of those words, wants to let it blow for the sheer pleasure of the explosion. The universe tends toward chaos, he’s heard, and he feels the pull of it, the seductive tug of destruction. He teeters on the edge, and then, with a kind of relief, gives himself to it. “What about you? You feel so great about yourself ’cause you bring some truckload of shit-stained baby clothes. Like Angel’s going to be so grateful for your charity. You think we need your secondhand shit?”
He’s holding the stack of streaked plates—scraps of fat, blobs of mustard. His bandages are grease-spotted. He watches himself look at the plates, watches himself make the choice. He holds them aloft, eyes on his sister, and then lets them fall. The noise is terrific. Shards spray across the kitchen.
For a moment everything is still, and then his sister’s expression makes its way through stages: shock, fear, fury. “You’re drunk. Oh my god, you’re drunk.” Valerie rushes from the room. “Mother!”
Yolanda runs from her bedroom, hand on her heart. “Who’s hurt?”
Angel, Sarah, and Lily cluster around, looking gape-mouthed at Amadeo and the mess he’s made.
In a moment Valerie has gathered her daughters, dragged them outside. “Come now, girls.” Her voice is low and taut with fear.
Yolanda and Angel follow, barefoot, alarmed. The door slams.
Amadeo alone stands in the bright kitchen, surrounded by shards of porcelain, his heart hammering. Around him the counters are bright and glaring and clean: the green teakettle, the row of cereal boxes on the counter, the bowl of new fruit. Beyond the breakfast bar, the television carries on. From the full sink, the sound of quiet settling as the bubbles melt into the cooling water. And outside, voices.
They’re lit by the porch light. Valerie has a daughter pulled tight under each wing. He can’t hear them over the laugh track in the living room, but he knows it’s the same old conversation. “He’s an alcoholic, Mother. He’s an alcoholic and he’s dangerous.”
He leans his forehead against the cool wall. Amadeo doesn’t feel remorse for smashing the dishes; he’s just sad for his mother because once again she’s in the position of having to defend him, to tell Valerie that he’s getting better, that he’s a good boy at heart.
Amadeo closes his eyes, concentrates on the cool solidity of the wall. Around him the black universe spins.
Yolanda takes a sleeping pill and then a second. Breathe, she instructs herself.
Usually just being alone in here calms her, in this bedroom that is all hers. All the beautiful objects she wanted as a child and bought herself as an adult: a canopy, a pink satin bedspread, a skirted dressing table.
But her pillow is flat, her blankets too hot, the room too cold. The pain in her head is too large to be contained by her skull. She wants to open a window for the fresh air, but she doesn’t want to hear when Amadeo gets home. Tomorrow, she’ll be firm, tell him he needs to quit drinking and to start earning a living. But god, she dreads it.
“I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” he’ll intone, and Yolanda will be expected to tip him back into balance. She wants to skip this stage: the apologies, the begging and remorse and entreaties.
“I hate Valerie,” he’ll whimper into her chest. “She always blames me.”
And Yolanda will have to comfort him. “I know,” she’ll say, patting his head. “But she’s right. In this case, she’s right.”
Ah, well. The cycle won’t last forever. She imagines her tumor as a mass of wires, snapping electricity from the raw ends, sending little shocks into her bloodstream.
All night she’d worried about how to tell them about her diagnosis. She watched them squabble, waiting for an opening. As the night progressed, she even began to look forward to her announcement. She enjoyed the thought that with a single sentence, she could blow the whole gathering apart.