by Unknown
“Finnish kids are the happiest kids in the world, and they have the least homework but they still succeed on tests and whatnot.”
Their presentation and accompanying visuals are good—almost embarrassingly good, compared to those of their classmates, most of whom just slapped printouts from Wikipedia on their boards. Because Angel and Lizette needed this project as a pretext, they’ve worked hard on it, harder than either of them realized. Angel is soaring.
“Since 1930 every new baby gets a bunch of baby stuff, for free from the government,” says Lizette. “Clothes and towels and everything. Like, everything you need for the first year.”
“But the really important part is the box it comes in, just a regular cardboard box for the baby to sleep in. Finnish babies sleep in boxes.” This is Angel’s favorite part. “It was started to cut down on babies dying of SIDS, which they were doing a lot of before the boxes, and now that they sleep in cardboard, the death rate is really low.”
Lizette’s eyes shine. “It’s all totally free. Health care, too. The poor people get the same care as the rich people, except no one’s totally poor, not like here. And the moms get paid to stay home with their babies because that’s an important job, too, and that makes the babies grow up healthier.”
“That’s communism,” says Jen. “Not cool.”
“You for real?” cries Ysenia. “Who cares if it’s communism if even poor babies get to be healthy?”
“It’s not communism,” says Angel firmly. “It’s called”—she consults her notes—“democratic socialism, and every rich country besides us does it and they’re all better off.”
“Not fair!” says Trinity, and they’re all alarmed to see that she has tears in her eyes. “Kristiana deserves that, too. All of our babies do. Instead we got to spend a buttload of money we don’t got and no one even cares if McDonald’s is the only crap job we can get where we get burned by the fryer and we have to leave our baby with our sister whose boyfriend gets high. That’s messed!”
A pall falls over the classroom. Everyone averts their eyes as Trinity stands and leaves, shutting the door quietly behind her. Christy follows.
“Well,” says Lizette. “It’s not like Finland is paradise one hundred percent. It’s cold as junk and they have to eat that crap.” She gestures to the table where their International Feast is arranged. The bowl of egg butter sits, sulfuric and glistening yellow, on the table with the other national cuisines—boiled potatoes, microwavable egg rolls, cold bowtie pasta drenched in Ragú.
Brianna steps forward and starts the applause. “Thank you, girls. That was incredibly informative, and you delved into serious policy questions. These are all issues that you can be active in championing, and when you turn eighteen, you can vote for representatives who keep the interests of your children in mind.” But the girls are already helping themselves to the feast.
As the others line up, Lizette leans into Angel, unsmiling, raising a wry eyebrow. “Hey,” she says, her breath on Angel’s ear so that Angel immediately gets wet, right in the middle of everything. “We kicked ass.”
The world is wider, more enormous, more filled with possibility than Angel ever suspected. She could visit Finland, move there even. She and Lizette could move together, dress the babies up in little down-filled suits and Nordic sweaters, enroll them in free preschool, feed them sweet braided breads and egg butter and reindeer puree.
“You guys,” Jen calls from across the classroom. She holds up her plate of egg butter in one hand, a laden spoon in the other. “This is awesome. Good job, you guys!”
Brianna strides over. “That was wonderful, girls.” She touches their poster board, with its carefully penned statistics on Finnish education and blue-and-white flag, and Lizette’s remarkably lovely drawing of a reindeer in a sauna.
Angel is surprised by Lizette’s grin.
Brianna turns her attention to Angel. “You worked really diligently. I’m delighted to see this.”
Angel wishes Brianna would include Lizette in that glow of approval. She grabs Lizette’s arm. “Yeah, we both worked really diligently.”
But it’s too late, and Lizette pulls away, her face steely.
Yolanda used to love going out with friends after work, but has done less of it since Cal. She retouches her makeup at her desk, dissatisfied with how papery her skin looks, how deeply set her eyes. She fluffs her hair, but it’s thinning and brittle and without any curl at all.
This morning Monica alighted at Yolanda’s elbow, the fingertips of one hand tense against the gleaming desktop. “What’s going on with you, Yo?”
Yolanda blinked gluey eyes. On her computer, an email from Facilities Operations regarding an upcoming carpet cleaning. She wondered what she’d been doing in the moments leading up to Monica’s arrival at her side.
Monica peered at her with an intensity usually reserved for her job, her carefully shaped eyebrows canted. “Are you working too hard?”
Yolanda’s throat knotted, because, as busy as Monica is, she noticed.
But Monica didn’t wait for an answer. “Tell you what,” she said briskly. “Let’s go out tonight, yes?” Then Monica pushed off Yolanda’s desk, propelling herself into the next task.
Monica has invited Sylvie and Bunny, too. They’re waiting in the doorway with their coats and purses. “Cocktail time,” Sylvie calls.
“You girls ready?” asks Bunny, her tone, as always, laced with concern. Bunny Flores has a small face with features that crowd inward toward her pointy nose. She is only in her fifties, but suffers a host of physical problems. A bad hip, even after two surgeries, causes her pain. She also has problems with crystals in her ear and about twice a year gets sudden, debilitating vertigo. Once Yolanda came upon her in the women’s bathroom, on her hands and knees, clutching the tiles as if the floor were a vertical wall she was trying to climb. Bunny is single, openhearted and generous, considerate of her friends in the way of female saints and sickly Victorian children. If you compliment a necklace, she’ll take it off and give it to you. Yolanda always attributed these kindnesses to Bunny’s failing body, but now that she herself is ill, must concede that Bunny is simply a good person in a way Yolanda will never be.
“Let’s go to the Cowgirl!” Monica says, rushing out of the inner office with her purse and about five totes from various state conferences. Yolanda has nothing against the Cowgirl, but she is uncharacteristically irritated that her boss doesn’t leave the choice of restaurant open for discussion. Isn’t Yolanda the point of this dinner?
A proper dying woman would set aside vanities and desire, would smile at strangers and loved ones alike with wan generosity. But Yolanda is just as easily peeved as she ever was. She still expends her swiftly draining energy on annoyance with Monica Gutierrez-Larsen for bossing their girls’ night.
Yolanda massages her eye sockets, trying to will herself into a better mood.
“Let’s walk, shall we?” Monica suggests.
“No way,” says Sylvie, to Yolanda’s relief. “In these shoes? Besides, Bunny’s got a handicap placard.” So they all pile into Bunny’s SUV and she drives them the half mile to Guadalupe Street.
A bluegrass band is playing, the name of which Yolanda forgets the moment she reads it on the poster: a young bearded man in flannel and slim jeans and vintage cowboy boots works a fiddle, his face contorted in concentration, while a big girl in a black slip and vintage boots of her own alternates between guitar and mandolin. They’ve perfected an old-timey sound punctuated with whoops and thigh-slapping, and when they address the audience between songs, they do so in a breathless, ambiguously rural accent that’s probably put on.
“First pitcher of margaritas on me!” Monica’s spirits are so high that Yolanda wonders if she’s drunk already.
Yolanda herself feels quiet and stiff and strange, and is having trouble attending to the conversation, which consists entirely of work gossip. Leonor Nelson is having an affair with Paul Marcus, who everyone, apparently, tho
ught was gay.
“Oh, come on, Yo,” says Sylvie. “How could you not think he’s gay? He’s always been single. He walks with his shoulders back like this!”
“Poor Leonor,” says Bunny. “For her sake I hope he’s not gay.”
The songs are simple and catchy, and Yolanda taps her feet. She’s barely touched her margarita, because, side effect of the chemo, the cold hurts her fingertips. When the doctor told her an occasional glass of wine was okay, she’d nearly laughed. She couldn’t imagine wanting to pour more poison into her system. Now, though, she pulls the stem toward her and sips from the edge, and as the liquor moves through her, her mood lifts.
When her pulled pork sandwich arrives, she’s starving. It’s perfect: savory and spicy and sweet, the bread collapsing under the sauce.
“Look at you eating with a fork,” says Sylvie.
“A real lady!” Monica cries, then orders another pitcher.
With a start, Yolanda realizes she’ll need to give her notice soon. She hates the thought of letting Monica down. Monica will need to start looking into hiring a new assistant. Yolanda herself will probably have to train her replacement.
Between sets, while the boy and girl guzzle beer, bottles dangling with careful casualness from between their fingers as they swipe their sweaty foreheads, the stereo system plays songs Yolanda knows: Johnny Cash, Doc Watson, Guy Clark, Hank Williams.
When “Honky Tonk Blues” comes on, a fat man in worn jeans and cowboy boots gets up and, in the tight space between the stage and the tables, begins to dance a one-man two-step, arms out, inviting an invisible partner. He’s acne-scarred with a pitted, bulbous nose. Long, curling eyebrows, full, feminine lips, jowls as dangling and red as wattles on a chicken. He is, Yolanda thinks, the ugliest man she’s ever seen.
“He’s good,” says Monica, and indeed, the man is light on his feet.
The women watch, laughing. He winks and smiles; he is performing, hips swaying, and then he’s dancing with easy steps toward their table. His eyes are on Yolanda.
“Dance with me,” the man says, extending his hand.
Yolanda waves him away. “Oh, no, I’m not dancing.”
“Not yet you aren’t, but just wait five seconds. Five, four, three—” He pulls her onto her feet while behind her Monica and the girls call “Go! Go!”
“There’s not even a dance floor,” Yolanda protests. She is drunk on the few sips of her margarita, laughing. She feels full of meat and tequila. He spins her skillfully, eyes on her all the while, and she realizes, with a shock, that despite her scrawniness, there’s still something in her that he’s attracted to. He really is very ugly—round and short as a toad, with odd patchy muttonchops and sweat glazing his bald pink head. His eyes, though, are brown and kind and she thinks of the knowing sad eyes of some large gentle creature: a gorilla, a horse, a Saint Bernard. Yolanda must have thought he’d smell bad, because she’s surprised by the pleasant muted scent of soap. She moves her face closer. Under her palm, his shoulder in its polo shirt is humid and comforting.
Yolanda isn’t a terrific dancer, but tonight she lands on exactly the right foot. She remembers something a man once told her when she was out dancing twenty years ago: “If I make a mistake it’s my fault, and if you make a mistake, well, that’s my fault, too.” This is how she feels in the man’s expert arms, like nothing is expected of her but being.
When the music slows for Nanci Griffith’s recording of “Speed of the Sound of Loneliness,” Yolanda pulls away. “Thank you. That was fun.”
But the man’s hand remains gently at her waist. “One more.”
“Okay.” Yolanda isn’t even sure she hears herself. He holds her lightly at a respectful distance, his belly just grazing hers, and she feels herself ease against him. What in the world’s come over you? Nanci sings.
He spins her smoothly, draws her back in, and there, over his shoulder, at a table alone, is Anthony. He watches Yolanda in the arms of this man, tapping one finger on the table, his cuffs short at his wrists. Yolanda falters, but her partner doesn’t let her fall behind. Anthony smiles, but his eyes are sad. This time she feels no fear. Come dance, she thinks. He shakes his head.
She closes her eyes and the music moves through her, everything sleepy and slow, and she is clutching the warm cotton of the man’s shoulder. Together they are awash in light and sound and a straining, delicate sadness. Out there running just to be on the run. As the music trails away, Yolanda grips the back of the man’s shirt. She doesn’t want to be let go.
Then the man bends his face to the side of her neck and kisses her. The kiss is truly the most erotic kiss she’s ever received. The surprise of it sends a wave of sensation down her spine.
“Thank you,” the man says, with a funny little bow. Yolanda makes her way back to the table of women. She shakes her head to clear the haze.
“You got kissed,” Monica says in a stage whisper, refilling her glass. “By a goblin!”
Not a goblin, Yolanda wants to say, but she can’t bring herself to form words. She wants only to focus on the feeling of his lips at her neck.
The band starts up again, and the conversation moves back to work gossip: some other flirtation, the bad attitude of a man down the hall, the arrest of a state representative’s teenage son for hosting a raucous party. A couple has been seated at Anthony’s table across the room, and Anthony himself is nowhere, bones in a grave in the Las Penas cemetery. A couple times she glances over her shoulder to where the man is sitting with his own cluster of friends. He winks.
Back in the Capitol garage, Yolanda walks Monica to her car. Her boss is more or less steady on her feet.
“Are you okay to drive?” Yolanda asks. The effects of her own sips of margarita have long faded.
“Yeah,” says Monica, looking at the time on her phone.
“You’re sure?” Yolanda is eager to be alone and on her own way home. She wants to think about the dance, about that kiss. She gives Monica an appraising look, and Monica’s car, too, a black BMW with a prism dangling from the rearview mirror. “Hey,” she says. “You have a crack in your windshield. My son can fix it. He’s an expert.”
Monica studies the bull’s-eye. “I’d love that. That thing drives me nuts.”
Driving, Yolanda scans the radio stations, trying to find those old songs, to find anything that matches her mood, but the country station is playing new songs full of bluster and patriotism, and she turns it off. In the silence of her hour’s drive north, she carries the glow of that kiss, holding it as a kind of talisman against seizures.
As she pulls into her driveway, something sharp twists above her heart. It hurts, the knowledge that life can still hold moments like these. Out of nowhere, a dance, a visitation, a kiss. This is the world she’s leaving.
Perhaps because Lizette hasn’t been in touch, and because Angel is feeling overlooked and sad, when Ryan texts asking if he can come by again, she lets him. She could use the distraction, she figures, could use his dumb, dog-like admiration.
It’s Saturday afternoon, and her grandmother is running errands in town. Her dad has hitched a ride with her “to hang out with a friend.” From his vagueness on the topic, Angel suspects it’s a date. What kind of woman would consent to go out with her unemployed, live-at-home, license-suspended father is beyond Angel, but apparently it’s the same kind of woman who would be up for a Saturday afternoon date while his mother stops by the Center Market.
Ryan told her he’d be there at two thirty, and, indeed, he pulls up at 2:28 exactly. Only when she lets him into the house does Angel realize they haven’t been alone together since that fateful night. She suspects he’s thinking the same thing, because he looks even more slouched than usual, standing in the kitchen, biting his dry lip, his pale arms sticking out of his Beatles T-shirt. He picks at his thumbnail. “Where’s Connor?”
“He’s still napping, so.”
“Oh,” says Ryan, disappointed, but just then Connor whimpers sleepily fro
m the bedroom.
“I’ll get him,” she says, relieved, though ordinarily she’d see if he’d fall back asleep.
Ryan trots after Angel as she goes down the hall to retrieve the baby, looking with frank interest at the framed photos on the wall: Valerie grinning at age four, Amadeo scowling at six, a picture of Angel herself as a bald infant in a puffy red dress.
Keep your eyes to yourself, Angel wants to say. “Wait here,” she tells him outside her bedroom door. No way does she want him picturing where she sleeps. She slips in and pulls the door shut after her.
“I’ve been reading books about babies!” Ryan calls.
As unwelcoming as she feels, Angel is glad he’s shown up. Not because she likes his company especially—he’s such a freak that it’s embarrassing—but there’s something reassuring about his presence. Alone in this house, she can’t help thinking of creepy men peering through the windows at her. She can’t help thinking of Mike.
They sit in the living room eating potato chips, Ryan flopped out on the floor with Connor, jangling toys in his face to make him laugh. Angel watches with an eagle eye, and when Ryan picks up the baby, her heart lurches, but Connor jabbers happily.
Ryan has brought dispatches from EVHS. Some of the items of gossip are so dull that she can scarcely imagine she once used to care. The science teacher slipped his nephew, who is also his student, the answer key to a weekly quiz; Janelle Garcia and Charlie Chacon have gotten together.
Other items of gossip, however, smart. “Oh, yeah, your friend Priscilla hangs out with Jasmine Lucero now. I heard Jasmine’s grandma is taking them to SeaWorld.”
“What? She hates Jasmine Lucero. She said Jasmine smells like old-lady garlic breath.”
Ryan’s lip curls in distaste. “God. Priscilla’s kind of a B-I-T-you-know-what.”
“You can just say bitch,” Angel says, grateful.
“My mom hates that word. I’m never supposed to call a woman that. It’s even worse to call a man that because then it’s like the insult is that the man is a woman, you know?”