Molly began to make a strange sound, jerky and high. “Don’t do this,” she said, and she beat her fist against Bud’s shoulder.
“I will not leave this house,” Bud said loudly.
“I am going to telephone for the police,” Grandpère said. He stood straight and stiff, his chin now lifted, his head high. A kind of heat, a fine outrage, came from him in waves, so powerful that it seemed almost as though he were doing something violent, though he did not move. “Go back into the kitchen and wait for them to come. Leave the room, sir,” Grandpère said, and the way he spoke was so stern and so menacing that I wanted to leave, myself, to get away from it. “Leave this room,” he said, again.
Bud smiled, his swollen face splitting in a manic grin. “I’ll leave when I’m ready to leave,” he said to my grandfather.
Grandpère, without turning his gaze from Bud’s face, spoke to my father. “Robert, go and telephone the police. I’ll stay here.”
My father hesitated for a moment—he didn’t want to leave his father, we could see that—and then he turned and came urgently through the dining room, toward us, his face tense, before going into the hall to the telephone.
“Yes, get your son to do your work for you,” Bud said sneeringly, putting one hand on Molly’s shoulder. “It’s a nice way to live.” He nodded blearily, contemptuous. “Of course, I don’t have the opportunity myself. Since my son does your work for you too, driving you around in your shiny car.” He nodded again. “My son’s no help to his father, no more than my daughter is.” Now Bud’s face changed, and it became no longer sneeringly triumphant but dark. “My daughter does someone else’s work as well. And whose work does my daughter do? What manner of man does my daughter work for? What manner of work is it that she does for him?” He waited for a moment, his face still full of rage, still wild, but now tortured. His rage had somehow turned inward, or had become general; it seemed as though he was angry now at the whole world, though he leaned again toward Grandpère. “My daughter can do nothing for her father. Her time is taken up by looking after someone else’s child. And who is that? Satan’s child!”
The way he said those last two words—furious, anguished— chilled me with fear. Satan’s child! Margaret had had Satan’s child!
Grandpère looked steadily at Bud, not moving.
“Bud!” Molly was shouting at him now and pummeling. She pushed at him, as hard as she could, but he was huge, massive, leaden.
“She’s here with us for Christmas, Margaret’s little girl, here with her family, same as your precious grandchildren.” Bud raised his chin at Grandpère and then looked, for a moment, toward us. I felt invaded by his eye, and leaned toward my grandmother.
My father reappeared from the hall. “They’re on their way.” He spoke to Grandpère, who did not stir, whose gaze did not leave Bud’s.
“Now, leave the room, sir,” Grandpère said severely.
“I will not,” Bud said, raising his chin even higher. “I know you think you’re too good for anyone, so maybe you’re too good for a fight.”
My grandfather said nothing to this. My father, next to him, looked very dark now too. The blood came into both their faces. Our dog Huge was on his feet, his ears pricked, alarmed. My mother put her hand on him.
Molly moved in front of Bud and threw herself at him, shoving him backward. “Get out of here,” she cried, beside herself. “Get out of here.”
It seemed now that Bud was out of steam, somehow, or energy, and when she pushed at him he was off balance, and took a staggering step back. “Get out of here,” she said again, furious, her voice cracking. “Get out, get out, you fool.”
She pushed Bud, step by lumbering step, back through the pantry door, and then it swung shut behind them. For a long moment my father and my grandfather stood still, beneath the giant portrait of Grandpère, looking majestic and elegant in his scarlet coat and black boots, holding in his hand the hunting whip, with its long, curled-up leather thong.
I waited for someone to speak. I waited for the next thing that would happen, for the grown-ups to take charge again. I didn’t understand these things, and I knew that no one would explain them to me. I knew that all of it—the blue nightgown and the bare feet, Molly’s terrible high frantic voice and Bud’s glaring pink eyes, even the fat woman in her trailer with all the plants—was part of the language I still could not speak.
Part of what I felt was shame, shame for something I didn’t understand. Shame for other people’s misery, shame that it had lain naked and exposed before us, shame that we’d seen it. I felt sorry for the wild wretched sweating Bud, pushed back into the kitchen, waiting for the police. I felt sorry for the daughter of Satan, pressing her pale face against the banisters. I felt sorry for Molly, weeping and shoving at her husband.
The only ones I didn’t feel sorry for were the woman in the trailer and Tweenie. I liked the woman in the trailer. She seemed strong and free, and I liked thinking of her, plump and blue-eyed and messy, living on the edge of the big field, with her plants in coffee cans lined up below the windows. It seemed that she would escape shame and misery, that she had somehow risen magnificently above them. And of course I still hated Tweenie.
The Face-lift
This happened in San Salvador, not long ago. My friend Cristina was coming back from lunch at a restaurant, downtown, with her mother, Elvira, and her mother’s friend, Consuela. They were in Cristina’s big car, and they all three sat in the back. The driver was in the front seat alone.
Cristina was dropping her mother and Consuela off first, at her mother’s house. Her mother lives on a narrow street lined with high stucco walls and solid gates. Everyone in that neighborhood has big heavy gates, controlled by electricity. The way it works is the car drives up to them and the chauffeur pushes a remote control button, and the gates open inward, and the car drives inside and they close after it. The walls in San Salvador have always been high. In the past there were broken bottles cemented into the top of them, a row of glittering teeth to keep people from climbing over them. Now there are no longer broken bottles on top of the walls, there are electric wires instead. El Salvador has always been like this, but since the revolution it has been worse.
Cristina’s car pulled in to Elvira’s clean quiet street. All the houses there were tidy, the high stuccoed walls all freshly painted, all the gates stood tightly closed. They drove slowly down the block toward Elvira’s house. There was a car parked halfway down the block, which no one noticed then. At her mother’s house, Cristina told the driver to pull over to the curb, to let her mother and Consuela out. They didn’t go in through the big gates, because Cristina was going on from there. The car was letting the two women out at the little street door, right next to the sidewalk.
“Por aquí, por aquí, por aquí,” Cristina said rapidly to the driver. Cristina says everything rapidly, she moves quickly and talks fast. She is quite beautiful, with thick black-brown hair and large, bright dark eyes. She has a round face and a short straight nose. Her eyelids are slightly droopy, which gives her a drowsy, aristocratic look. She was my roommate in boarding school.
Cristina and I went to the same girls’ school outside Philadelphia, on the Main Line, but we came from very different worlds. I grew up in the country, in western Pennsylvania. My mother was a librarian at my elementary school, and my father was a doctor. We lived in an old stone farmhouse, rather dark inside, with small windows. I was an only child. Every night the three of us sat down to dinner at the round wooden table in the kitchen. We bowed our heads, and then my mother said grace over the food. Afterward we raised our heads, and it was my job to pour each of us a glass of water. The water pitcher was made of dark blue china. My father spoke very little at meals, and inside our house it was quiet. Outside the house there were smooth rolling fields. At night I could feel the three of us in our small lighted house, alone in all that empty land, set among the dark fields.
I was brought up to be good and obey the rules, and I
was, and I did. It seemed impossible to me to violate those beliefs that grown-ups held—that rules were important, that lies were intolerable, that being good was the correct way to be. At school I was good. I wasn’t good enough to be a star at anything—I was a mediocre student—but I wasn’t bad. The worst thing I ever did was to sneak out on Halloween and go trick-or-treating through the darkened streets of Bryn Mawr, carrying a pillowcase and knocking timidly at front doors. I never lied to teachers, or snuck out to meet boys, or cheated on tests, or snuck in alcohol, or smoked marijuana, or did anything important. Those things were beyond me, somehow, out of my reach. The rules I’d been given held me within their bounds.
But Cristina came from a large family, in a fiery hot place which was unimaginable to me, and she broke any rule she felt like breaking. She kept vodka in our room at school, right on her bureau. It was in a pHisoHex bottle, in full view of all the housemothers. Cristina looked straight into teachers’ eyes and lied about where she was going for the weekend. She lied about how she was getting there and who she was seeing. She did all this with a bold and absolute certainty that I admired: she was utterly sure of the rules she wanted to break, and of the things she needed to do. She didn’t care about her marks, or about honesty, or about living up to people’s expectations. All that was immaterial to her. The things she did need to do were things like going off to Princeton for the weekend. The things she didn’t need to do were things like homework.
After we graduated, I went on to college and Cristina went back to El Salvador. In school she had laughed when I asked her about college.
“Are you kidding?” she asked. “You have no idea what it’s like down there. No one I know goes to college.”
“But what do you do instead?” I asked.
“We do our hair, then we do our nails.” She looked up at me and laughed again. “What we do is visit each other. We go and stay with friends in their country places, then they come and stay with us at our beach houses. We go to someone’s ranch in Argentina. We go down to Rio, sometimes. We’re busy!” Cristina said excitably. “This takes up all our time. Then we get married,” she added.
While she was telling me this Cristina was sitting on her bed with no clothes on, a thick maroon towel wrapped around her head. She had a bigger, thicker towel wrapped around her body, tucked in on itself at her left armpit. Her legs were shaved perfectly smooth. She was doing her toes, very carefully and meticulously, and she had little tiny puffs of cotton separating each toe. She had a bottle of scarlet nail polish, and undercoat, and top coat, and bottles of other luxurious things, emollients and oils and lotions. It looked as though a professional had just stepped out of the room for a moment, in the middle of doing a job on Cristina’s toes.
I never did my toenails at school. Even today, I’ve never done my toenails. My feet are large and rather homely. Putting scarlet shimmer on my big square nails would be an error, and I can’t help knowing this. I loved the way Cristina put scarlet shimmer on her nails, everywhere, wherever she wanted.
Cristina got married two years after we graduated from boarding school. She asked me to the wedding, but it was during my final exams, and I couldn’t go. In fact I never went down to see her. We wrote to each other for a few years, but Cristina is not so interested in writing. After the letters stopped she sent Christmas cards, and each year I would examine the family photographs: there was Cristina, looking wonderful, tanned and gleaming, with her delicious smooth caramel skin and her thick dark bronzy hair and sleepy eyes, standing beside her husband, who was very handsome. Cristina had always said she would marry only a handsome husband, and so she did. His name was Carlos, which she pronounced “Car-los,” with that wonderful sort of gargle just before the “l.” Car-los had dark skin, a square face, dashing low eyebrows, big brilliant black eyes. The children looked like Cristina, exactly. Two girls and a boy. I watched them on the Christmas cards, turning more and more like Cristina each year, their chins pointed, their small perfect bodies supple and alert, their features neat and animated. I knew their names: Analisa, Jorge, Elenita. Sometimes, when I was thinking about Cristina, I would say those names in a whisper to myself: Analisa, Jorge, Elenita. They had such a crackle, such a lilt. That seemed to be the way Cristina’s life was.
After college I got married, and in the beginning I thought I would have children, too. I sent Cristina Christmas cards, sometimes seasonal pictures of reindeer or snowy forests, and sometimes snapshots of Mark and me. Every year I hoped I would be able to put a note on our card: “Next Christmas there’ll be three of us!” I imagined writing the notes. I imagined different ways of making my announcement, something lively or funny or clever. A photograph of the two of us with a note next to it: “How many people are in this picture? Wrong.”
Cristina didn’t come to my wedding because she was pregnant with her first child. She was too big to travel, she told me. She couldn’t move, she told me. I smiled as I read this, trying to imagine Cristina big as a house, lying like a languorous whale on a long sofa out on the veranda, long-leafed plants in giant urns at each end. I liked the image of her sleepy and swollen. This is what it’s like, I thought to myself, with a little thrill of anticipation. Soon I would know about all this: morning sickness, fatigue, swollen ankles.
When I learned that she had become pregnant again, three years later, I felt a jolt. It seemed unfair, that she should be pregnant for the second time before I was for the first. Then it happened for the third time. I saw her swollen belly on the Christmas card photograph of that year, with a casual hand laid on top of it, and I felt betrayed and abandoned, as though some promise to me had not been kept. I loved Cristina, and I didn’t begrudge her having children. It was just that each time she did, I felt more severely the absence of my own.
Cristina always asked, on her Christmas cards, when I was going to come down and visit them, and I thought for years that I would. But there never seemed to be a time for me to do it, and so I just kept Cristina and Carlos and the three tiny Cristinas in my head. I imagined them, living luxuriously, in a low colonial city, stone buildings, wide colonnaded avenues, palm trees, those scarlet flowers erupting everywhere.
When I heard about the revolution, about assassinations and hostages and desaparecidos, I worried. I wrote Cristina twice, but I heard nothing from her. I hoped they had moved to Guatemala, where Carlos had family and business interests, or somewhere else out of danger. Both Carlos and Cristina came from very rich families, and it seemed that everyone they knew was rich. That—being rich—had seemed originally like a great shining carapace of protection over them, shielding them from everything: from having to go to college, waking up in the night with a crying baby, having to carry money, having to stand in line at the supermarket, having to find a parking place. But during the revolution down there, being rich took on another aspect. Then it seemed like some dangerous heat you gave off continually and involuntarily, which made you terrifyingly vulnerable, a target for those hot blasting heat-seeking missiles which followed you through the air no matter how you twisted and turned, no matter what you tried to do to save yourself.
I hoped that Cristina and her family were somewhere safe, and I found out later that they were. They had gone to Guatemala, I heard, and then one year they turned up in New York, the whole family, for a week before Christmas. Cristina called me, and we met for lunch. She looked just as wonderful as she always had, vivid, exotic, her clothes a little brighter than a New York woman’s, her jewelry a little more brilliant. She held my shoulders tightly in her hands and kissed me on both cheeks.
“Julie!” she said. “You look wonderful!”
I don’t look wonderful, I know that. I’m plain, with pale freckled skin. I’ve put on a middle, and I wear my skirts below the knee. My hair is just as it was at boarding school, shoulder length, and held back from my face with a tortoiseshell band. Even when I remember to wear earrings, as I had that day, it looks as though I’ve borrowed them from someone. I’ve always
looked like this. I never had the nerve to wear clothes that were tight and spangled, jazzy and stretchy. When I was at school, it seemed to me wrong to wear clothes like that. It seemed then that there was a moral choice to be made, and I felt somehow that I was coming down on the right side. I think I believed in some long-term goal, as though later on I might get an award for Discreet Dressing. Now it’s too late for me to change; this is the only way I know how to look.
I’m divorced now. Mark has remarried and lives in San Francisco, where he works for a software company. He has two children, boys, I think. I haven’t heard from him in years. There’s no reason for us to talk, ever again, really. Nothing connects us now but pain. Looking back at that time we were together is like looking into a black tunnel of grief, tumultuous, endless, without solace. Just thinking of his name brings back the memory of that misery.
I’m used to living on my own, though it’s not what I’d hoped to do. I live in a small apartment in Murray Hill. I run a family arts foundation that specializes in music education, and we give away fifty thousand dollars a year, in small grants. We review the recipients very carefully. We visit the site, we interview the participants, we talk to other people in the field for references. It’s important to me to feel that we are rewarding the people who most deserve it. I want to give them their due.
I’ve always tried to be fair, and to be responsible. I thought that was the way the world worked, that it was the way everyone worked. I was always amazed, at school, that Cristina got away with what she did. There were times, even though I loved her, when I have to confess I almost hoped that Cristina would get caught at something. There were times when I resented her amazing bravado.
I remembered her, one Friday afternoon in junior year. Cristina stood coolly in the handsome front hall of the school, on the Oriental rug, next to the big Spanish chest. She was wearing a new orange suit and waiting for the taxi to come and take her to the train with her suitcase.
A Perfect Stranger Page 3