by Unknown
“She won’t bring me down.” Angel wants Brianna to tug her hair again—the unexpected affection felt so good—but Brianna is scrutinizing her own nails.
“How are things at home?” Brianna asks. “Your dad doing okay?”
“My dad? Yeah, everyone’s good.”
“I’m glad. Everyone in good spirits?”
Angel nearly mentions Ryan Johnson. Maybe Brianna has advice. But Angel’s scalp prickles. She has the sense that this is an important moment, that her character is being tested. “Listen, I know you don’t like Lizette, but—”
“I don’t not like Lizette. That’s just not the case at all.”
“I mean, I know she can seem disrespectful, but she’s had a sad life. She’s an orphan.”
Brianna nods, that professional enamel hardening. “Be that as it may, Angel, everyone is subject to the classroom rules, and I’d be remiss if I didn’t hold her to the same high standards as everyone else.”
When Yolanda can’t sleep, she walks up and down the length of the house. The pain is a ball of clay behind her eyes. Sometimes, by pressing the heels of her hands into her skull, she can push the clay into a manageable shape, and it will stay more or less contained for up to a minute.
Now, after two in the morning, the house, with its cinderblock walls, feels tomb-like, so Yolanda eases the front door open and steps outside into the cool air. But the night is so immense, and the stars scattered sharp and high are so coldly beautiful, that Yolanda flees back inside.
This evening, as they were watching television, Yolanda surprised herself by beginning to cry. The commercial was sad, sure, involving a girl and her old dog and a kindly father, but Yolanda is not usually vulnerable to sentimentality.
“Are you crying, Gramma?” Angel asked.
“No.” Yolanda laughed through her tears. Who was she identifying with, anyway: the girl? The father? The dying dog?
“You’re crying over an insurance commercial?” Angel jostled her with her elbow.
“Get a grip, Mom,” Amadeo said affectionately. “Geez, what a softy.”
All at once Yolanda remembered: “Your dad wanted to get you a dog, Dodo. You loved your stuffed dog, and he wanted you to have a real one.” Anthony had harped on it for weeks during a manic phase in that last year of their marriage, and Yolanda had argued against it, because the care and feeding would fall to her. Amadeo hadn’t even, in the beginning, wanted a real dog, not until Anthony gave him the hard sell, and she’d resented Anthony for putting her in the role of the starchy, mean mother. “Do you remember?”
Amadeo appeared not to have heard her, and even this struck her as funny. The hilarity swept her up and up. She glimpsed herself in the mirrored back of the doll cabinet and was startled by her stretched lips, her face glistening grotesquely in the lamplight. Fear stuttered across Angel’s smile, so Yolanda gasped, dragged a sob back into herself.
“Whoa boy.” She wiped her eyes. “Don’t know what’s got into me.”
They swiveled their heads back to the television, chuckling. The whole episode ended before the commercial break.
“Mom,” Amadeo said, “we need more cheese. Get the sharp cheddar. That Mexican blend don’t taste like nothing.”
Yolanda wants to prepare her children for her absence, but she can’t bear the thought of them imagining the world without her, as if by imagining it, they will push her one step closer to total erasure. Still, she longs to unburden herself. At the supermarket, a girl with bleached hair barely glances at Yolanda as she scans her groceries. I’m dying! Yolanda imagines telling her. I’m dying, she imagines telling Monica Gutierrez-Larsen or Sylvie Archuleta or Bunny Flores. She pictures the compassion that would roll out and surround her like fog. She would fall backward, let her bones and aching head sink into that compassion.
She thinks of this bedroom enduring without her. All her belongings, so carefully chosen, so carefully tended. Who will appreciate her dressing table, her satin lampshade, the lace curtains she hand-washes each year? Valerie, Yolanda knows, thinks it’s all tacky. If it’s up to her, Valerie will deposit it in the Goodwill parking lot after hours. Maybe, Yolanda thinks hopefully, one of the girls will want her bed.
Why does she spend so much time thinking about sadness? She doesn’t have to, she realizes. She doesn’t have to grieve what she will never see: Lily in college, maybe with contacts and some cute clothes; Sarah—what?—playing professional soccer?; Angel as an adult, married, perhaps, to a man who will give her the stability she needs to catch up on everything she’s missing out on. Connor walking and talking and starting school, becoming a full person. These futures aren’t hers anyway, were never promised to her, were never promised to any of them. Yolanda doesn’t have to keep banging her head against that terrible, immutable fact. She doesn’t even have to see the fact as particularly terrible.
Instead she can enjoy the time she has left. She can gaze up into the pink of her canopy bed. Allow the body to be a colander, recommends the Mindfulness for Pain CD they gave her. She just has to let the pain pass through her on its way to somewhere else.
Yolanda is aware that this clarity will dart out of sight any moment, that she will, more than likely, wake up tomorrow to a brain cluttered with all the usual preoccupations. But this glimmer, regardless of how brief it may be, surely counts for something. Even when it is lost to her, this glimmer will be like a window open in a distant room of a rambling, stuffy house, stirring the air. She can see the dust motes swirling, golden and mesmerizing.
On Monday, Angel and Lizette meet after school to work on their project.
Lizette’s house, where she lives with her older brother and his girlfriend, is on a dead-end in a run-down development. The homes are identical: brown stucco with six ornamental vigas poking out just below the roofline, a small weed yard. At the end of the street, where the asphalt meets a low cinderblock wall, the desert stretches.
“How old’s your brother?” Angel asks, slowing her pace to match Lizette’s.
“Twenty-one.”
“Cool,” says Angel. “So he can buy for you.” She wants Lizette to think she has a wild side.
Lizette shrugs.
It’s a windy afternoon, and the sky is pale and dusty, but with heavy monsoon clouds banked at the horizon. Although Mercedes has been fussing the twenty minutes or so from Smart Starts!, Lizette moves without urgency, with her rolling fat-girl walk. Angel left her father’s truck in the lot because they only had the one car seat, and now she is impatient and neck-sore and sweaty, regretting she didn’t bring the stroller, antsy to put down Connor and her bags. Also, for some reason, she’s tongue-tied and nervous.
“I’m just up here.” Lizette lifts two fingers from Mercedes’s back to gesture.
Before them is a junkyard of car parts. Engines lurk in the weeds, dark and greasy, and tools and bolts and other choking hazards scatter across the surface of a bent Formica table. The garage gapes, spilling still more automotive bounty, as well as a massive unfurling roll of plastic garbage bags, the end of which flaps taut and threatening in the wind. In the driveway, a rusting motorcycle lists to the side on its frail kickstand.
Angel imagines Connor pinned by the bike, his fragile skull crushed and his face ground into the dirt. Somehow, when she was pregnant, it had never occurred to her that Connor would be born mortal, vulnerable to the forces of the world. It hadn’t occurred to her that it was within the realm of possibility that she might outlive him. She squeezes the image from her mind, afraid—as always—that she is inviting the universe to visit upon her son this very brutality. She smiles down at him bravely, and he offers his drool-soaked fist. She can’t forget that she told him she hated him. “I’ll be good,” she murmurs into his scalp. “I promise you I’ll be good. I promise so much, baby.”
To Angel’s relief, Lizette passes the junky house and turns up the walk at the last house, where a prim blue wicker wreath hangs on the door. Here the weeds are almost pretty, high and gree
n, some dotted with tiny yellow flowers. Angel is ashamed that she expected the worst of Lizette. Someone has cleared a small plot, slightly off-center, and planted tomatoes. They droop against their wire cages like adolescents. “That’s nice,” says Angel. “Your brother’s girlfriend do that?”
“My brother. Me and her hate tomatoes.” Tilting back so Mercedes rests on her chest and both hands are free, Lizette rummages through her diaper bag. “I can never find my fucking keys.”
In the front window is posted a handwritten Beware of Dog sign, though there is not, as far as Angel knows, a dog. At least she hopes there isn’t. Dogs have always scared her, ever since she was eight and Priscilla’s stepdad’s Rottweiler lunged at her. Again she tightens her hold on Connor. She heard once about a pit bull that ate a baby right out of its crib.
If the dog shows any sign of aggression, any whatsoever, even just mild exuberance, she’ll take Connor and leave, never mind if Lizette thinks she’s uncool. Angel carries Connor to the plants, shading his patchy scalp with her palm. “See? Tomatoes.” They dangle as shriveled and tender as testicles. Connor humors her, frowning seriously for a moment at her finger, before shifting his gaze to the fascinating chaos next door that threatens to breach the property line.
On the porch, Mercedes starts wailing in earnest. Lizette has set her on the concrete, and she kicks vigorously, her eyes cinched against the sun.
“Are you sure the ground’s not hot? I can hold her.”
“Found ’em.” Lizette swoops down and deposits the squalling infant back on her shoulder. Her upper arms are splotched pink.
“You got a dog?”
“Nah. That’s to scare thieves. I told my brother it wouldn’t work.”
Angel is heartened by the specter of this brother, house-proud and fussy. Surely Mercedes and Lizette are in good hands.
“What we really need is to toss shit all over the yard.”
Inside, the drawn curtains glow yellow with the afternoon. The air is mossy from the swamp cooler. Angel steps cautiously after her friend, as if a dog still might leap out at her from the shadows.
Any tidiness seems to have remained outside; as Angel follows Lizette to the back of the house, she gets the general impression of stuff: piles of laundry, boxes of Pampers, and loose rolls of toilet paper, bags of chips and shoes and dishes on every surface. It’s the result, Angel supposes, of people who are basically kids living together unsupervised. Her real concern, Angel realizes, isn’t attacking dogs or falling motorcycles, but the uncle. He served a prison sentence—just a few months, though. She doesn’t think he comes by, but still.
“They let him out?” Angel asked, dismayed, when Lizette mentioned this at lunch a couple weeks ago.
“He’s on parole. It’s not like I see him. Just barely one time at my cousin’s.” Her brother went with him once to the mud bog races. Lizette didn’t even seem upset when she related this. “Joe feels bad for him. His life is shit, which, good. My cousins won’t even talk to him, but they barely talk to me either, so.”
Angel had wanted to ask why Lizette didn’t have an abortion, but suspects that arranging a procedure would have been tantamount to admitting what had happened to her. The logistics were scary and impossible enough for Angel, and Angel wasn’t raped. Plus, it feels obscene to ask such a question in front of Mercedes, who is so adorable that to imagine her never existing is sad.
“Do you like your brother’s girlfriend?” Angel calls now over Mercedes’s cries.
“Selena’s cool,” Lizette says. Angel strains to hear her, because, as if unwilling to concede anything to anyone, she doesn’t raise her voice over the baby’s screams. “She’s, like, obsessed with Mercedes, always telling Joe she wants one. But I think they’re going to break up soon. They don’t say it, but they’re always fighting. She’s gotten into chiva. Not bad or nothing, but it bugs my brother. He won’t touch it ’cause that’s how our mom died.”
“God.” Angel wants to offer sympathy, but doesn’t know how Lizette will react. She hopes the girlfriend does leave, and soon, taking all her drugs with her.
Lizette pops a finger in Mercedes’s mouth, and the baby quiets for a moment, then pushes it away. “I really hope they don’t break up.” Angel is surprised by the note of vulnerability in her voice.
“Yeah.” Angel reminds herself that Lizette is motherless and alone, and that this girlfriend of Lizette’s brother is family, some of the only family she has left, and retracts her wish. In her own arms, Connor whimpers, irritable, arches his back.
At the end of a dim hall, Lizette pushes open her door. The room is crowded with furniture: unmade single bed with faded black sheets, torn brocade armchair, heavy wood bureau, and, jutting into the middle of the room, a crib. A black beanbag slouches in the corner. On the walls are Kanye and Jay-Z posters, and, incongruously, given what Angel knows of Lizette’s tastes, a quilted pink L. Angel thinks of Lizette’s dead mother, choosing that pink L for her little girl, taking it home and hammering a nail in the wall. She wonders how much later that mother died.
“If they do break up, which one’ll stay here in the house?”
Lizette sinks into the sagging armchair and maneuvers under her shirt, exposing a fold of belly. She grabs a pair of sweatpants off the floor to cover herself, and, almost without looking, gets Mercedes positioned. The crying ceases. “I don’t ask. The only good thing is they got four more months on the lease, so I’m not homeless yet.”
At that word, homeless, Angel misses a breath. “But even if your brother leaves, you’re going to move with him, right?”
“I don’t know. He won’t want me hanging around, not if he’s single. Plus I’m almost eighteen. I could find my own place.”
She doesn’t even seem worried. Angel nearly says, You can stay with me, at my grandma’s, but then looks away. An embarrassed heat overtakes her, and she pats Connor too rapidly to be soothing.
Connor fusses, mouthing the fabric of her T-shirt. Finally, she steps around the tangle of clothes on the floor, perches on the unmade bed, and begins to feed him, too. She hunches and half turns to cover herself. They sit, the only sound the snork and smack of the babies, and the air feels thick. Angel finds that she can’t look at Lizette, and trains her eyes on Connor’s head instead. Why isn’t Lizette more worried about her future? Angel is almost angry at her.
“So I started doing research,” Angel says. “The child care over there in Finland is great. Did you know that? They’re number one in the world on education.”
“I know.”
“You picked Finland on purpose?”
Lizette drops her head back, exasperated. “Uh, yeah. I heard a lady in the office talking to some other lady about it. I wanted us to get the best country.”
Angel regards Lizette with admiration. “Well, get this. I researched foods. There’s lots of crap we can’t get, like reindeer, and they got all these crazy berries, like a cloudberry, ever heard of it? But one of their main foods is egg butter, like fourteen hard-boiled eggs mashed up with a whole lot of butter. They smear it on pie.”
Lizette repositions a leg of the sweatpants over her shoulder, then swings Mercedes upright and gives her a few firm whacks on the back. “Egg butter? Fucking sick.”
“Yeah, but if you think about it, it’s basically just egg salad.”
“Like I said, fucking sick. Also, who puts egg salad on pie? We should cook that for our report and make Brianna eat it.”
“Isn’t she vegan?”
“You’d know better than me.” Lizette gives a crooked, challenging half-smile. Angel’s heart starts up a jittery percussion.
The small window is divided into panes by a plastic grid that seems not entirely affixed, and the slanted diamonds of light fall across the floor and a half-full soda bottle. An amber-colored pool of light refracts onto a crumpled white T-shirt, and Angel focuses on this spot.
Her mouth is dry. When did Angel start looking at Lizette like this? Or rather, when did lookin
g at Lizette become so difficult? She is constantly aware of Lizette’s movement in the classroom; wherever Lizette is, Angel is oriented toward that place.
Before long, Lizette heaves herself up and deposits Mercedes in the crib. Connor, too, is asleep, his mouth slack.
“So.” Angel tugs her shirt down, her movements exaggerated, then stands. She sets Connor beside Mercedes, noting that the crib sheet is none too clean. Good for his immune system, she tells herself. Her back to Lizette, she reattaches her bra, smooths her shirt. Mercedes is not much bigger than Connor, despite being seven months to his three and a half. Her chin is canted up, as if in defiance, but her face is, for once, relaxed. Angel places a flannel blanket over both babies. Then she digs in her backpack for her laptop and notebook. She opens the laptop, a protective barrier.
“There’s something I’ve always wondered,” Angel says, though she only wondered it just this minute. “Does all breast milk taste the same?”
Lizette leans against the dresser, sardonic. “Are you asking to suck my titty?”
“No.” Angel’s cheeks warm. “God! No. I was just wondering. Biologically.”
Lizette laughs, an edge of meanness. “You want to suck my fucking titty.”
“I don’t,” Angel says hotly. “You would think that. You think everyone wants to.”
“I’ll let you if you want to.”
Angel trains her burning eyes on the screen, begins clicking randomly. “Shut up.”
Lizette kneels before Angel, takes the laptop from her and sets it on the floor. “I’ll taste if you taste.”
Angel jolts back as Lizette lifts the hem of her shirt. “Jerk,” Angel says, without conviction. “Stop making fun of me.” She pushes Lizette’s head away with her palm, but Lizette’s hands are inside Angel’s shirt, cupping her breasts, and her mouth is hot on Angel’s stomach. Angel’s hands drop to her sides. She isn’t breathing. She may never breathe again. Lizette unsnaps the front clasp of Angel’s bra, and Angel’s awful milk-heavy boobs swing free. She puts her arms up protectively, but Lizette nudges her away with her head, as insistent as a dog.