by Joy Williams
The other nurse said, “You’ll wear yourself out trying to make sense of no sense.” She didn’t care for this one. She was awfully eager and still being evaluated. It was quite possible that ultimately she wouldn’t get the job.
Fortune
It was the parents! When would the parents stop coming? They’d been coming for months, since Christmas, since before Christmas, since the Burning of the Devil festivities on the seventh. June’s mother and her second husband had arrived, missing Howard’s parents by only a few days, for they had come down specifically for his twenty-second birthday. Caroline’s father had come down for Valentine’s Day with his new wife and their fairly new infant to show her to Caroline, as though she cared. Abby’s parents were still in town, having arrived for Semana Santa—Holy Week, which was now just past—and James’s parents would be showing up any day now from Roatán, off Honduras, where they had been diving. And each set of parents had a new child with them. There was Emily and Morgan and Parker and Bailey and Henry, not one of them over the age of six. It was a phenomenon.
The parents were generous when they visited. June’s mother’s new husband chartered a plane and flew them all to Tikal. They climbed Pyramid IV and watched the sunrise, even baby Morgan in her tiny safari ensemble. And even though June’s mother’s new husband had rented rooms for them at the Jungle Lodge, one night they’d slept out among the ruins in hammocks. Everyone knew this was the desired, anecdotal thing to do, sleeping out among the ruins beneath the bats during a full moon, which it happened to be that night. June’s mother and her new husband had expensive cameras and they took pictures of everything, they were delighted with everything. They were already planning on returning to Antigua in July for the Parade of the Heads to see the gigantes and the cabezudos weaving down the streets beneath the fireworks and whistling rockets.
When Howard’s parents came, the father, a prominent throat specialist, rented horses for everyone and they had ridden to one of the lakes for a picnic. Even baby Bailey made the trip, wrapped in his mother’s arms with one tiny hand clinging to the pommel. The whole group of them, eight in all, trotting like a cavalry through the poor little towns on these big-assed horses, leaving behind piles of green-flecked dung. Where had they gotten such healthy horses? It was embarrassing. “Buenos días!” Howard’s parents said to anything that moved. It was amazing they hadn’t been stoned.
Caroline’s father appeared with darling Emily, a redhead, and his lively new redheaded wife, who wore a ring in her navel and was only two years older than Caroline. There had actually been something of an incident when everyone had been invited for lunch in the garden of the Hotel Antigua. There were some hummingbirds in the hibiscus bush near them, green and purple ones, the size of mice. One veered toward Emily in her high chair, no doubt encouraged by the feathery brilliance of her hair, and her attentive mother smacked it sharply with a guidebook she was holding. The bird spun to the ground in a buzzing heap.
They all shrank back from it a little.
“Gee, Penny,” Caroline said.
“It was coming right at the baby,” Penny said. “It almost flew into her.”
“Hummers can be exceptionally aggressive,” Howard said, smirking.
“Maybe it’s just stunned,” June said. “Maybe if we put it under a bush.”
James took a linen napkin from the table and placed it over the bird, which was still whirring like a windup toy. Darling Emily bounced in the high chair and clapped her hands. She wore a sweet little dress embroidered with ducks. James walked beyond the table and was about to lay the hummingbird down.
“Farther,” June said. “A farther bush.”
He came back with the napkin and put it on the table.
“James,” Abby said, “is that blood?”
He picked it up again and refolded it.
“Maybe we should have eaten it,” Howard said. “You know, so as not to waste it. We should find its nest and eat that too. The Chinese eat nests.”
Penny frowned at him. “I am sorry,” she said. She dabbed at the plate of fruit she had been feeding Emily. “What is this, guava? Or papaya? One of them upsets her tummy.”
Another pitcher of margaritas appeared from somewhere. It was a very well-run place. Gardeners swept the walks quietly with palm fronds tied to sticks. One of the swimming pools had the heads of a hundred ivory-colored roses floating in the deep end.
“You’re great kids,” Caroline’s father said. “Really, you’re terrific kids.” Clearly, his spirits had taken more of a beating from the hummingbird incident than his wife’s. “You’re fine kids. Caroline, you have fine friends,” he said.
All the visiting parents liked to pretend that the young people were charming. It was funny seeing this, each of them pretending this in their own way. The children were exhausted by the parents’ vigor, they felt wearied by their presence. They were repelled by the parents’ dedicated interest in them, they were astonished. Will we ever be this blind, do you think? they’d say. No, they agreed, they could not imagine themselves being this blind…
They were all starting off in their twenties. Each had come separately to this colonial town in the bowl-shaped valley beneath the three volcanoes and found one another here. Each of them remembered their first solitary days in town and then the speed with which they became involved in a life with the others, their friends. And they still wondered how this had been accomplished, and how much of it they had each been responsible for. They felt that here their lives were now beginning.
At the same time, they felt it was possible that their actual lives were still waiting for them, and that they involved different people. This was something they found themselves thinking about more and more, usually with unhappiness, as the parents kept coming.
Holy Week and its enormous, numbing spectacle was over for another year. The great obligation was over. The great anda borne by the penitents had been stored. The dyed sawdust and fresh flowers that had covered the streets in elaborate designs before being mangled by the penitents’ feet had been swept away. Everyone loved Good Friday—betrayal and trial and cruelty still having the power to captivate—but Easter was a letdown. The promise of Easter was the same old promise. The town was hot and quiet, and everyone was still a little drunk.
Abby and June were having breakfast at one of the cafes that faced the park. The fountain was not operative this morning. Usually water plashed from the stone nipples of a trio of heroically sculpted women, but today they stood inactive, though still with their mysteriously withdrawn expressions as they held their lovely breasts. Workmen in boots rooted around in the water beneath them.
“I think your parents are cute,” June said. “They’re not like Howard’s. Poor Howard.”
“I spent ten to two with them yesterday,” Abby said. “Then I took them to the market and my mother would say about anything, ‘Is this the best price you can give me? Is this the best you can do?’ In English, of course, slowly, in English. Candles, bananas, those tiny bags of confetti, everything…She bought me lightbulbs, she insisted. ‘You have all these dead lightbulbs,’ she said, and I said, ‘Mom, we can buy these in the store, we don’t have to be bargaining for them in the market.’ Then I had to spend six to nine with them too, back at the hotel. And that Parker! He had to run across the cobblestones, and of course he falls down and practically tears off his kneecap. Finally, I cracked. I said, ‘I’ve got to have a day off. I can’t have another meal with you for a while, I just can’t,’ and my father said, ‘We aren’t taking out taxes.’ ”
June laughed, but then she said, “What did he mean?”
“Maybe he said withholding,” Abby said. “It was a joke. Like I thought it was a job, my being with them.”
“Oh, that’s funny,” June said. “That’s what I mean. They’re not that bad.”
“I can’t believe they adopted that child and then named him Parker,” Abby said. “Where did that name come from? My mother reminded me that I had pro
mised to take him tonight so they could go out to dinner by themselves.”
“When my mother was here and I was with her at the bank?” June said earnestly. “And I was sitting there looking at my mother in line to get money? I had an epiphany.”
“Really,” Abby said.
“It was…my mother will always love me.”
“That’s an epiphany?” Abby said.
“It wasn’t a thought. It was like…” June trailed off. “Your mother will always love you too, forever, no matter what.”
“Isn’t that amazing?” Abby said. “Really, it’s amazing, if it’s true.”
A young Guatemalan boy wearing filthy green shorts with a broken zipper and a Chicago Bulls T-shirt came into the cafe holding three glass Shangri-La bottles by the neck. Then they saw Caroline walking by with her brown long-legged dog on a rope leash.
“Caroline!” they cried together.
She joined them, dragging the dog in with her. He had been neutered not long before, and he had a plastic basket on his head so he wouldn’t rip his stitches out. The stitches should have been taken out by now and the basket removed, but Caroline was putting it off even though the Indians laughed rudely at the sight of them. Neither Abby nor June would have been capable of walking a dog around town with a basket on its head.
“Can’t we take that off the poor thing?” Abby said.
“I know, I know, but then he bites his fleas,” Caroline said. “I’ve got to give him a bath first.”
The dog smacked the basket against the table leg and lay down with a thump. He was an odd little dog with large dewclaws and a strangely malformed mouth. Caroline had bought him in the market for two quetzales, about thirty-five cents. She took excellent care of him in a somewhat unbalanced fashion and was always trying to improve him. Caroline was an artist, she had always been an artist, things just came to her sometimes. She was thin, almost ascetic-looking, and had a temper.
Abby continued to look at the dog, at its long fawn-colored legs that seemed so breakable. Pets made Abby feel discouraged. In the run-down motel where they all rented rooms by the month, the guardian had an aged, arthritic parrot who was brought out on a stick every morning and left to hobble around on a broken bench beneath some banana trees until dusk. Sometimes June would gently spray him with water from the hose, which seemed to neither distress nor delight him, so Abby didn’t know why she bothered. The motel also housed some members of a street band, who were seldom there, and a morose man with a bulging vein in his forehead that appeared to beat incessantly. He made a living from his fortune birds—three yellow canaries in a bamboo cage that would tell your future by selecting a small rolled piece of paper from a pinewood box. The tiny prophets’ names were Profeta, Planeta and Justicio, and they seemed untroubled. The motel was not far from the parque central and was next to one of the town’s many ruined cathedrals, the rubble from one of the collapsed walls making up part of the courtyard. The rooms were small, dark and cold, but each had a perfect view of Agua, the most beautiful of the volcanoes.
The Guatemalan child, having been paid for the bottles, was threading his way back through the tables. He paused and gazed beseechingly at June’s pancake, which she had barely touched. Abby had not eaten hers either and was using the plate more or less as an ashtray.
“June,” Caroline said.
June looked at the boy. “Sure, sure,” she said. He plucked up the pancake with slender fingers and hurried outside. He crossed the street and stared at June as he ate.
“Is he scowling at us?” June said. “I mean, what is it exactly that one is supposed to do?”
The others would often tease June for being so grave about everything. She wore oversize American clothes, a plaid shirt and brown shorts, and a woven necklace that her mother had bought her during her visit. June had wanted the necklace badly and had led her mother to the store, which was frequently closed, more than once. She affected ragged black and blond hair, which she made sticky with shaving cream.
“Imagine him and Parker as playmates,” Caroline said. “Little playmates.”
“That is so radical,” Abby said.
The boy finished the pancake, then turned modestly away from them to urinate.
“Oh, gaaa,” June said.
“My mother is finally beginning to notice the public urination,” Abby said. “ ‘You know, honey,’ she said, ‘this is a lovely town, but so much public urination goes on. I don’t think I’ve ever seen so much public urination. You walk through the park and men are urinating behind pieces of cardboard. Boys are urinating on flowers. We went to look at some churches and were poking around the courtyard and an old man was urinating on a pile of sand. When he finished he flapped his hands at us. He scolded us! He said we were not supposed to be in the courtyard, we could only be in the church. He was the ostiary or something, or thought he was…’ ” Abby was mimicking her mother’s nasal, bemused manner of speech.
“They’re still here, your parents?” Caroline said.
“Oh god, yes,” Abby said. “I have to watch Parker tonight so they can go out. It’s their anniversary.”
“We’ll all watch him,” Caroline said. “We’ll sit around in a circle and blow smoke at him or something. Howard will ask him his opinion of death.”
“That is getting so old,” Abby said. “It’s like an old bar trick or something.”
“Morgan’s been the darlingest,” Caroline said to June. “Don’t you just love her?”
June blushed. “Do you know what my mother told me? She said she had always been emotionally indifferent to my father, from the very first, but now she had found happiness and she hoped that I would find such happiness.”
“Oh,” Caroline said. “It’s like a little blessing she gave you, isn’t it? That’s so nice.”
“I love watching June blush,” Abby said. “Really, June, you are so funny.”
Then she and Caroline talked about how they wished they had a car they could share. Then they began talking about how James claimed to have stolen a car in Texas and driven it through Mexico into Guatemala, where he’d sold it for a great deal of money in the capital. This was a difficult, virtually impossible feat and the story had always elicited considerable admiration. James also claimed that once, prior to stealing the car, he had been arrested in California for underage drinking, and that as part of his sentencing he was forced to attend the autopsy of a drunk driver. He described how they had sawed off the top of the dead man’s head.
“I think he made up that stuff about the cadaver,” Abby said.
“I didn’t believe that for one minute,” Caroline said.
“I don’t know about that car from Texas either,” Abby said. “He’s so enthusiastic about that experience, he probably didn’t have it.”
“What are you thinking, June,” Abby asked.
“I was thinking I have no sense of direction,” June said. “I can’t remember the names of flowers or ruins or saints. And I can’t keep a journal. Any journal I keep sucks.” She was thinking of Edith Holden’s precious Edwardian journal with all the lovely drawings. The one she had in prep school. Edith Holden had died tragically young, drowning in the Thames while collecting horse chestnut buds, the twit.
The bill arrived and June began to go over it painstakingly. “Excuse me, pardon me. Perdóneme?” she called to the waitress. “But no one here ordered the huevos revueltos.”
“Oh, just pay for it,” Abby said. “All that stuff is fifty cents or something, isn’t it? I’ll pay for it.”
“No, it’s my turn,” June said, counting out some coins. They then got up with a great scraping of chairs on the ugly tiles.
On the street, the dog strained toward a mound of burned plastic in the gutter and managed to acquire something repellent before Caroline hauled him away.
“He is so dim,” she said. “I thought fixing him would make him smarter.”
“That is so funny,” Abby said.
They reached the h
eavy scarred wooden doors of their compound. They pushed them open and Caroline unknotted the rope from the dog’s collar. He leapt into the air and ran around the courtyard three times at remarkable speed before a bougainvillea stump snagged the basket and sent him sprawling. The parrot dropped the piece of mango he’d been toying with and crouched against the gnawed slats of his bench. The parrot’s name was Nevertheless as far as anyone could translate it. The dog didn’t have a name.
The fortune birds were not up yet. Customarily they rested until noon in their cage, beneath a clean dish towel. For them Easter Week was one of the biggest weeks of the year. They had told a thousand fortunes. Their director, the man with the staggeringly large vein, was sitting at a card table in a corner of the courtyard writing new fortunes in an elegant script on blue pieces of paper. He wrote swiftly, without reflection or emotion. James and Howard were playing Hacky Sack on the grass with a tiny stitched ball that said I ♥ JESUS on it. They had bought it from some evangelicals who did massage. The boys had been so dumped the night before, clutching their glasses of aguardiente, that they could hardly find their mouths. Now here they were, sleek and quick.
June blushed when she saw James, for she had drunk a great deal of aguardiente last night as well and recalled asking him, “Do you think I have a personality?”
“No,” he had said.
“A personality,” she persisted.
“Why would you want one? You’re fine.”
“But I should,” June said.
“Look at my wallet,” he said. It was a long leather wallet clipped by a chain to his belt. “There was a whole bin of these on sale at the airport and the merchant said that each wallet had its own personality because it was natural material and the lines and colors and imperfections made each one unique.”
“That’s sick,” June had said.
“Personality is secondary to predicament,” James had said.
She was attracted to James, to his deep-set eyes and perfect skin, but none of them were lovers. That would have spoiled everything. Love was a compromise, they felt. They were not like their parents, who were always in love and who just went on and on with life, changing partners, acquiring new children, abandoning past interests and assuming new ones, always in love with someone or something.