by Unknown
But then, as usual, Amadeo took the stage. And Yolanda, who ought to have been surrounded and petted, wept over and adored, was once again backed into the same tired role of defending the indefensible. What does Valerie want her to say? Yes, Amadeo is a disaster. He’s a failure. And Yolanda has failed, too, for raising him to be this way.
Poor Valerie. When Valerie was a child, she’d strain over her homework, scowling and nail-biting and breathing fierce taurine breaths, until she was nearly done, just a problem or two from the end, and then she’d burst into tears, melting over the worksheet in anguish, ready to give it all up. Every night, she’d be nearly across the finish line when she’d fall apart, and every night Yolanda would have to come to her rescue, lift her up, praise her and reassure her and promise her that she was smart and capable. And Valerie would argue, because what did Yolanda know about fractions or the Revolutionary War?
Valerie has never forgiven Yolanda for making Anthony move out, has never stopped missing her father. She all but stopped speaking to Yolanda in that time after the separation, whereas little Amadeo would climb into her lap and pat her cheek anxiously, asking, “You okay, Mama?” Valerie baffles Yolanda, moving as she does through the wider world, grasping hold of projects Yolanda doesn’t understand. She knows the girl feels hurt by Yolanda’s closeness to her brother, but the fact is that Amadeo, for all his malefactions, has been easier for Yolanda to mother, his needs so much clearer.
Yolanda had liked Valerie’s ex-husband, had been impressed by his job as a network specialist, and grateful her daughter had found a man who knew computers and had a steady job, and at the UNM law school, no less. She liked his easy flirtation with Yolanda herself, the way he never failed to kiss her cheek and always helped bring dishes to the table. Yet all the while, he’d been hitting her daughter, and Valerie, proud Valerie, so intent on being the family’s success, hadn’t said a word until the bruises had already been documented and charges pressed, when divorce proceedings were already underway. It had chilled Yolanda to realize that her instincts were so blunted, that she’d been so susceptible to that charm.
Yolanda should have known better. For the eleven years of her own marriage, Anthony teetered on the brink of destruction or self-destruction—both options seemed equally likely. When he was really bad, she hid the guns in her uncle’s garage, and refused through tears to tell Anthony where they were. She still remembers retrieving them from closet and drawer, toolbox and shed, working quickly, while Anthony was at a job site, placing them all on the floral bedspread: both handguns, three rifles, the BB gun he’d been given as a boy. She remembers their terrible weight, their dull metallic gleam, the sense, as she packed them carefully into a cardboard box, of their killing potential, each one heavy and wound tight, ready to explode. For months at a time, when Anthony was in his dark moods, weeping and raging about matters large and small, threatening to kill himself, Yolanda would drive to work with her trunk filled with every sharp object in the house.
For those months, she was unceasingly aware of skin: her children’s skin, Anthony’s skin, her own, so thin and easily torn, so unequal to the threat of blade and bullet. To let her children out of her sight was like a physical wound, even to send them on the school bus. Now, Yolanda can’t believe she allowed herself to live like that, and for so long. Every evening, she’d run out to the car, retrieve a paring knife from the trunk, chop the onions or trim the pork with furtive haste, then wash and dry and stow the knife before Anthony got home. She wonders now whether she was overreacting or underreacting. Yolanda can never be sure if her responses are appropriate to the situation, which is maybe a result of living in fear for so long. She used to catalog those knives religiously, but now it is obvious how misplaced her efforts were. As if Anthony couldn’t pick up a knife or a box cutter at any hardware store. As if he couldn’t borrow a gun from any one of his friends. As if he didn’t have others tucked away that she didn’t know about.
It embarrasses Yolanda now to remember how entirely her field of vision narrowed, how, in her efforts to keep her husband away from weapons, she repressed her own intelligence, and her dignity, too. For eleven years she was a neurotic caged creature, like one of Amadeo’s feeder mice, obsessively arranging and rearranging her nest, unaware of the snake waiting in the terrarium next door.
Yolanda grew weary of the responsibility. Anthony wasn’t her flesh, yet he demanded the same constant supervision that even her children had begun to grow out of. He was like a child, but without the sweetness and vulnerability that enchanted her in Valerie and Amadeo. Every time, Anthony would pull out of his dark periods, beg her forgiveness, promise to never scare her like that again, and she’d relent, relieved to give the guns back.
For a long time it was just alcohol, at least as far as she knew. But one night, unable to sleep, she went out to find Anthony watching TV in the living room. It wasn’t long after eleven, though the kids had been asleep for hours, and Yolanda always went to bed early. She’d imagined curling up next to him, resting her head against his chest. He’d put one arm around her, his other hand on her bare leg. They’d watch whatever he was watching, and maybe, maybe, she could bring him back to bed with her. It had been so long since they’d held each other, since they’d spoken to each other with anything other than impatience or anger. Yolanda loved her husband, and this is why she tolerated his tantrums and his dark moods, his occasional rough pushes or slaps.
He was asleep on the couch—or rather, not quite asleep. Even in the cool light of the TV, she could see that his forehead was flushed, his eyes slit. His belt was loose around his bicep. Spread on the coffee table, all the props: square of foil, lighter, black-stained spoon.
When Yolanda approached, Anthony did not raise his head. She stood there in one of his undershirts.
“Not that,” she whispered. “I told you never that.”
“Yeah,” he murmured agreeably, then drifted off. The slack pleasure in his face almost made her envious. How dare he find such cheap satisfaction when all she did was work and worry? How dare he do what Elwin had done when he knew how much it had hurt them all?
She plucked the needle from where it had fallen on the couch cushion, imagining her own skin pierced, the skin of her sleeping babies. She turned slowly in the kitchen, queasily regarding the tip, uncertain how to throw it away, until she finally dropped it into an empty beer bottle, wrapped the whole thing in half a roll of paper towels, and double-bagged it. She took the bundle out to the trash can. After she’d cleaned up the mess, she paced the rest of the night, her blood coursing with the astonishment that her marriage was over.
When it was time to get the kids up for school, she covered Anthony with a blanket to make his sleep seem normal, and ushered them through their cereal and tooth-brushing as fast as she could. Once the bus had taken them away, she shook him awake and told him to move out.
There were entreaties, of course, tears, but Yolanda never wavered. The relief of having him gone was too powerful, a drug in itself. She braced herself for his incessant begging, but after the second visit and the fourth phone call, he quit trying. He was at his little brother’s house, his mother told her, where, no doubt, the two of them were drinking and shooting up to their hearts’ content, and, his mother made sure to point out, Yolanda was the one who’d driven him to it.
Nearly six months later, when she got the call from the police informing her of Anthony’s car accident, she’d been terrified at first that one of the children was with him, forgetting—stupidly—that they were never in his care anymore.
“Valerie! Amadeo!” she cried, flinging open doors, pulse throbbing in her head. When Yolanda burst through her bedroom door, Valerie looked up, her face open and surprised and then, very swiftly, irritated. “I’m working,” she said, then bowed over her notebook.
But Yolanda could not find five-year-old Amadeo. She ran around the house, then across the road to the Romeros’, calling wildly. Finally she came upon him and the othe
r kids in the arroyo, rolling dump trucks through the sand. Only now did relief flood her, because what she’d feared for so long had finally happened. Wordlessly she grabbed Amadeo by the wrist and dragged him home while he fought and yelled and resisted, then just cried, until finally, bewildered at his mother’s strangeness, he fell silent.
Thank god Anthony hadn’t killed anyone else. When she thinks of him driving off the road, sailing through the air, Yolanda imagines that with all the alcohol in his veins, he must have caught alight himself, a falling, fiery star, leaving nothing, but she knows that isn’t true; she was at the funeral, saw his casket. She stood beside his mother, patting her as she wept. His mother wrenched away. “You drove him to this!” she cried, and then clung to Yolanda again. They’d been separated, but not divorced, Yolanda on the hook for truck payments and credit card bills, for his myriad debts to their friends and family.
Yolanda is an optimist. Yolanda considers herself a happy person. Her life is filled with love and family and friends. She likes people, believes that they are basically good. But this doesn’t change her simultaneous belief that the universe is essentially malevolent, life booby-trapped with disaster. The evidence is clear: so many bodies damaged and beaten and destroyed, washed up on the shores of her life. And her own body, harboring its deadly secret knot. It doesn’t seem normal, the sheer quantity of awfulness crowded into her family. Sure, every family has its problems, but her family problems are uglier.
She knows what Valerie’s take on it all would be: that somewhere buried in their past someone committed the first act of violence, and every generation since has worked to improve upon that violence, adding its own special flourish. She thinks of that first man, a conquistador, here in this dry new land for the purpose of domination and annihilation, yanking on the arm of his newly christened Indian wife, and from that union a son was born. Generations of injury chewed like blight into the leaves of the family tree: shaken skulls, knocking teeth, snapped wrists, collisions and brawls and fatal intoxication.
Sometimes during her lunch hour, Yolanda walks from the Capitol building to the cathedral, not to pray, but to sit in the bright, airy quiet. She refuses to look at La Conquistadora, the wooden statue of the Blessed Mother tucked high and snug in an opulent niche in her chapel to the left of the altar. The conquistadors brought her from Spain, hauled her around with them like a lucky charm as they invaded the peoples of the New World, and she served as a placid, unmoved witness to the violence they wrought. No wonder the Spaniards loved her so: O Conquistadora, Our Lady of the Rosary, Blessed Mother, Adoring Mother, Our Mother of Excuses and Turning a Blind Eye, Our Lady of Willful Ignorance and Boys Will Be Boys, Our Lady of Endless, Long-Suffering Hope. In the nineties, in a belated acknowledgment of the Church’s violent past—or, more accurately, a feeble revisionist cover-up of that past—the bishop renamed her “Our Lady of Peace.” But there’s never been peace in this land, not then and not now, not for her family and not for Yolanda.
Yolanda rolls onto her side, presses her cheek into the pillow. This is her favorite position, the one she allows herself only when she really needs comfort. For years she’s tried to sleep on her back, because she heard that sleeping on your side gives you wrinkles, that long vertical one down the cheek. But Yolanda doesn’t have to worry about that vertical wrinkle now.
At the Rosary for Elwin, when Yolanda was fourteen, Yolanda’s mother advised her not to look at him spread out in his coffin. “If you do, you’ll always remember him dead, you won’t be able to help it.” So Yolanda hadn’t approached the coffin, but her mother’s warning had been a kind of curse, because she still can’t conjure the living face of her favorite cousin. What remains vivid is the scene of his death, a scene she invented from the adults’ whispers. The blue truck marooned in the dirt parking lot; beyond, the flashing neon sign: Engine RX. In her mind she approaches the truck, knowing what she’ll see. Elwin’s arms are spread, as if he’s opening himself to the stars, but the stars have been blotted out. His face glows orange, then pink, then green, eyes blank, rolled up to the whites.
Thirteen years later, at Anthony’s Rosary, there had been no viewing. Just the gleaming casket clamped shut. Although he didn’t actually die the night she caught him passed out in the living room, that’s the image that persists in her mind: the blue light from the television playing on his slack features. For thirteen years, it seems, Anthony had been chasing Elwin.
She never said goodbye to Anthony, not truly. She’d imagined that he might return to her as the person he’d once been, that she’d once imagined him to be.
Her biggest fear is that her son will get sucked down this same road, a fear compounded by the fear that her very fear makes it inevitable, and this is why she’s done everything she can to shield Amadeo, to provide a buffer against the consequences of his own bad choices. She can’t do otherwise.
How little they know her, her children. They are incapable of seeing her as anything but strong and nurturing and living only for them. Yolanda, a terminally ill cancer patient? Whose every thought must center on her own survival? No; it would be far too great a strain on their imaginations. They would never guess she was capable of such dark thoughts. This understanding makes her so angry she has to sit up.
She won’t tell them about her tumor, not until they have to know. She’ll buy herself as much normalcy and privacy as she can.
The decision comes as a relief. It’s for their own good—this crosses her mind, less a thought than a reflex, and she knows it’s a lie.
I don’t care, she thinks. I don’t care. Finally, mercifully, her mind slows and sleep pulls her under.
Long after her aunt left and her grandmother took her sleeping pill and kissed her good night, Angel sits on the floor against the couch, her homework on negative numbers abandoned beside her. She scratches a pimple at her jawline and glares at Valerie’s car seat.
The baby is active tonight. He is active every night, which doesn’t bode well for Angel’s postpartum sleep. For now, his ruckus is more or less muffled, but still when she drifts off, he kicks her awake, demanding even at age zero—age negative 0.075—her constant attention. Tonight he’s throwing punches and turning tense flips, as if he, too, is on the point of angry tears.
It was nice of Valerie, bringing these baby things—of course it was nice of her—but Angel glowers at the car seat with hot eyes. It reclines among the piles of baby clothes, sticky and encrusted with sand and lint and grime. There are still Cheerios caught in the crevices between the blue velveteen pads. Just because she’s sixteen and jobless doesn’t mean that she doesn’t deserve nice things. These disadvantages should mean she deserves them even more.
She understands now that no one will be throwing her a baby shower. Sure, once the baby is born, Angel will get the little party at Smart Starts!, with hummus and lemon poppy-seed muffins from the grocery store and paper towels from the bathroom dispenser for napkins. Everyone will go around the circle telling her what they value about Angel and their wishes for the baby, the same predictable things. I value that you’re a good friend. I hope he is happy and smart and goes to college. At the end they’ll present her with a brochure on early literacy and a wrapped board book donated by Ready Readers, either Goodnight Moon or The Carrot Seed or If You Give a Mouse a Cookie, the only titles they have.
But Angel wants a baby shower. She wants a duck-shaped cake with Welcome baby! spelled out in frosting and silver balls, wants laughter and a sunny room filled with ribbons and streamers and flowers. She wants piles of pastel-wrapped gifts—fleecy footed sleepers, gauze receiving blankets, baby toys that rattle and crinkle and squeak. Angel wants games, too—Pin the Pin on the Diaper, nursery rhyme bingo, that one where they swing the wedding ring in front of your stomach to determine the sex—and she wants to pass around her sonogram to laughing, photogenic, mimosa-drinking friends, the whole thing orchestrated by her dearest friend of all, a busy, effusive, adoring friend, the friend who is also her ba
by’s godmother. But Angel doesn’t have a wedding ring, she already knows her baby’s sex, and she doesn’t have friends anymore, not really, and certainly not a best one.
It pains Angel that she is thirty-seven weeks pregnant and still hasn’t found a suitable godmother for her baby. Angel needs someone affectionate, competent, and supportive, someone who will be a good influence when, inevitably, Angel isn’t.
She’s run through the possibilities: her mother and grandmother are already grandmother and great-grandmother, her old best friend Priscilla hates her, and wouldn’t have been up for the job anyway. All her friends from school have been distressingly easy to fall out of touch with. The girls from Smart Starts! offer support and understanding, but they are not godmother material. Take Lizette, for example. She’s full of bluster and brassy humor, and pretty, too, but she got pregnant because she was raped by her uncle. And she smoked weed pretty much her entire pregnancy, except for one weekend when she did meth—actual meth!—with some guy she met on the Rail Runner. So it’s no wonder, really, that Lizette managed to crap her baby out, because Mercedes was underweight.
Aunt Valerie was, until tonight, a possibility. But Angel’s baby needs someone who will make him feel special. Above all, Angel’s baby must believe he was anticipated, longed for, even tried for—she thinks of those pitying women, skinny middle-aged loose-skinned white ladies with their yoga pants and their Chinese babies in their grocery carts. And Angel does want him! When her doctor reminded her that adoption was a possibility, Angel shook her head stoutly. Even in the thick of her fear, she couldn’t imagine giving him up; he was already a part of her.
Angel will never, she vows, remind her child of what she missed because of him. “I would’ve gone to college,” her mother says constantly. “I would’ve moved to New York.” Well, her mother was free of her now. She and Mike are probably home watching some television drama, Mike waxing poetic about how amazing TV writing is nowadays, like he’s the only one to have ever made the observation.