Girl Act

by Kristina Shook

  Tristan and Gabriel took turns driving us to Rye, NY, while Shadow and I camped out in the back seat. He’s a big dog, but he knows how to curl up next to me. I watched Tristan and Gabriel talking, laughing, and sharing coffee, Red Bull, and stories, just to stay awake.

  Before I knew it, we entered Rye, NY. “Hello Rye,” I shouted. It’s old fashioned, but not un-hip; it looked like a happy place to me. A place where people who work in Manhattan like to come home to in the evenings or on the weekends.

  “Do I have my own room?” Gabriel asked.

  “Of course,” I said.

  The large faded yellow house stood down a gravel driveway. My heart was beating just looking at something that now belonged to me, a home. A house is a home. It really is.

  All of us got out of Tristan’s Land Rover, and stood in front of it. It had been sitting abandoned for years, but still had character.

  “Six bedrooms and three bathrooms,” I said.

  “Look at all the windows,” Tristan said, eyeing all the work that needed to be done.

  “I want to pick out my room first,” Gabriel said.

  “Go for it,” I said, as I handed him the house key. He raced ahead of us. I liked having a brother; it felt like what I’d always imagined. Tristan held me back and folded his arms around me.

  “Look at it,” he said, and I stared up at the old house, my house. It felt so new, the feeling.

  “If you share your American house with me, I’ll share my UK house with you,” he said.

  “You mean you have a home?” I asked.

  “Yes, I’ve got a tiny house, just outside London, it’s terribly lonely,” he said.

  I turned and kissed him. He was saying things to me that I had only imagined, you know, in all my larger-than-life movie fantasies—but this was real.

  We went in to the smell of a very old house that had been sitting unused for years. There were dusty sheets covering furniture, and the windows had cobwebs on them, but the rooms were small, cozy and perfect.

  “Come upstairs,” Gabriel shouted.

  We raced up the wooden staircase to find that he’d chosen a small bedroom facing the overgrown backyard.

  “This is mine,” he said.

  “It’s yours, bro,” I said. He nodded, and we left him looking out of the window.

  “Let’s find ours,” Tristan said, and we walked along the hallway peeking into the other bedrooms until we reached the one at the far end, which had a bathroom and a small bedroom near to it.

  “We could fix this so the bathroom could connect to only our bedroom, if you wanted to,” he said.

  I walked around the bedroom. It had a lot of window light funneling in that was beautiful, but the bathroom had not been tiled behind the vintage tub and sink. The floor was pine.

  “Can you tile it?” I asked.

  “You bet.”

  The tiny bedroom on the other side looked like it had been a nursery.

  “Might need to put a little baby in this room,” Tristan said with a wink as he caught me looking into it. Babies? Marriage? Love? Commitment? It all just swirled in my head.

  “As you like, luv,” I said, in my best fake British accent.

  We agreed that Tristan would stay to vacuum and dust while Gabriel and I went out to buy beds, a fridge, and a stove. All I had to do was to get the electricity turned on in my name, and I didn’t need the deed to do that.

  Gabriel and I walked past stores in Rye (a quaint, friendly looking American town, perfect for shooting a coming-of-age film in) and we bought everything we needed, including loads of gourmet food. I felt spoiled, I could have anything I wanted and yet what I wanted was to live with Tristan and Gabriel for the rest of my life.

  “We need to make extra keys, pull over there,” I said, and jumped out. I walked up to the key maker. “I need two extra house keys made, please,” I said, and watched while he copied my beautiful key into duplicates.

  “Here’s your house key, bro,” I sang out, as I got back into Tristan’s Land Rover.

  “I’m going back to Harvard this spring,” Gabriel said as he started the engine.

  “So, you’ll be home for the holidays and all summer, right?” I asked.

  “Yeah. I might bring a girl back with me, okay?” he asked.

  “You’d better. Love is number one, second behind a Harvard degree,” I said.

  Then while we drove back to the house, he played a singer named Rodriguez singing, Sugar Man. I had yet to see the documentary and Gabriel gave me a scolding about that. But, wow, we were both transfixed and I felt that for Gabriel songs said it all—like movies for me.

  Once inside we found Tristan examining the furniture with obvious appreciation for the way they were made. He gets high off wood. Go figure. The windows no longer had cobwebs, thanks to Tristan’s fast dusting. Shadow was fast asleep after playing in the back yard. We sat in the living room on the hardwood floor eating gourmet food out of containers while we waited for the beds to arrive. I felt almost like I was in the film Out of Africa. There’s a scene where Streep plays Karen Blixen and Redford plays the role of Denys Finch Hatton and they sit together in her suddenly bare home with a wistful bond between them. I looked at Tristan and Gabriel and my heart swelled. Everything felt cohesive and connected between the three of us. Still, we were all ready for a long nap. I pinched my arm just to remind myself that this was my cool life—it was mine, not some movie flashing by.

  30

  CIRCLE

  Tristan drove me to the JFK airport. “Make the most of it and then hurry home where you belong,” he said, as I undid my seatbelt and we kissed. My heart started to beat.

  “Are you my boyfriend? You know, just in case my mother wants to know,” I asked.

  “Tell her, you’re my girlfriend,” he said. I jumped out and waved good-bye.

  God, I couldn’t wait to go to bed with him. He had decided that we should wait until I came back from Panama, just because he thought it was going to be an intense trip. I didn’t have an opinion, but I was dying to do ‘it’ with him. It was so hard to lie in the same bed, only spooning.

  Before I boarded the airplane for Panama with my Louis Vuitton carry-on suitcase, I called Paloma, who was now good friends with the filmmaker’s soon-to-be-ex-wife. The film shoot had turned out to be a blast.

  “I’m sex starved, I hope I don’t dry hump a passenger’s leg!”

  “Girlfriend, I’m so proud of you for waiting. Because once you do it with Tristan, you won’t stop,” Paloma said, “Remember Holly Golightly in Breakfast at Tiffany’s, she ended up divinely happy and that’s what you’re allowing yourself to have,” she added.

  “It has started to feel like that,” I gushed.

  “Shut up and go see your Momma and clean up the past,” she said, and then hung up. Paloma doesn’t waste a second on bullshit—that’s why she’s my best friend.

  The plane ride was smooth and I didn’t hump anyone’s leg. I exited the busy airport into bright sunshine, warm weather, and the language of Spanish. I was dressed in my white jeans with the words ‘THINKING HEART’ on the thighs, a white Marc Jacobs sleeveless blouse, and my black Pradas—from Laurel’s wedding. My mother didn’t meet me at the airport because she wanted me to meet her in the center of the city. At a location she said was easy to find. It wasn’t. And yeah, if I found a taxi driver who spoke English and knew the way then it would be. In my opinion, she got a D- in points for that decision. She said something about not being able to leave her job in time. Okay, whatever, just glad I was only staying for the weekend.

  Fortunately a short, stocky, friendly-faced taxi driver hopped out of his taxi, “Miss America, I bring you anywhere, I am Pedro” he said. Eager to practice English, he told me he was fifty-four and the father of five kids. I laughed and gave him the address I had in my Smartphone. During the whole drive over, I helped with his pronunciation, during a typical tourist conversation.

  “Here you are. Have a good day. Thank you for
being a nice customer,” he said, as he pulled up to the curb in downtown Panama. The city was packed with color, noise, people, and almost every American fast food joint you could name. Ugh. Love my country, but I’m not sure about the food it promotes everywhere else. I mean, I came to visit and experience Panama for Panama, not Panama for America. Oh, well.

  “Pedro, your English is good, keep speaking every chance you get,” I said and I got out.

  I was facing the white stone building, as I paid him adding a handsome tip. I entered the community school and walked along the terra cotta tile hallway until I found the third classroom. It was filled with adults. She was in the middle of the room, wearing a loose, knee length brown cotton dress with large flowers printed all over it, and black cowboy boots. Her light brown hair hung in a braid down her back. She was thinner, and her face was makeup free. She seemed older, but that was natural. What really struck me about her was how much happier she appeared—and I couldn’t bullshit my mind about that.

  “Mi hija,” she said, and everyone in the class clapped.

  “My?” she asked them in a teacher’s voice.

  “Daughter,” they all said.

  And then one-by-one they introduced themselves to me, and told me using their new English words what a nice mother I had, how blessed I was. I headed up to her and she hugged me. It had been years and years and years. I hugged her, but I felt a mix of sadness—and a lot of stored up anger. She excused her class and instead of talking to me, she walked me around the community school building telling me about the cooperative group that ran it and what was taught in each room. Go figure!

  Then we headed out into the Panama sunshine, jumped into her dark red jeep, and headed for the Darien Jungle, where she lived with Santiago, her coffee bean man. Right away I noticed the wedding band on her finger. It was silver, interlaced with turquoise, not the gold ring my father had bought her. He hadn’t mentioned their divorce; I guess I just assumed it and this now confirmed it. She smiled, laughed and chatted about Panama, as if she had spent her entire life there. And as if I was any old friend coming to visit. I think she was nervous. I was furious.

  The Darien Jungle was like a movie set. The farther we drove, the dustier the unpaved roads became, transforming into farmland with a few scattered tabego shops along the way.

  “Your Aunt Helen was my good friend. We never lost our connection,” she said.

  I thought of her ashes in my Louis Vuitton carry-on suitcase, it felt so surreal.

  “I don’t think she ever gave up on a friendship,” I said, trying to imagine anyone dumping her as a friend. I had lost a bunch of friends from high school, and later after college, but auspiciously Paloma and Laurel had remained, my best, best friends.

  The dirt road zigzagged up to their plain one-story wood house, sans paint, and to the left and right coffee bean fields spread out for miles. The aroma of coffee was pungent and robust.

  “Do you drink coffee?” she asked.

  “You’d know the answer, if you knew me,” I said. It just slipped out of my mouth, but I wasn’t sorry.

  “I’ve missed you so much,” she countered.

  “Are you fluent in Spanish?” I asked, since I didn’t really know her.

  “Oh, yes, and Santiago has gotten stronger in English as well, but we speak Spanish all the time,” she said.

  “Great,” I said, since I wasn’t bilingual.

  “We won’t speak Spanish, while you’re here,” she added.

  She parked behind the house, next to a small dairy cow pasture with a cabin in back of it. We got out of the jeep and walked around to the front door, which was wide open—and there stood Santiago. He was in worn blue jeans, a blue jean shirt, and black cowboy boots, and his black hair was short, his eyes dark, and his teeth white. He didn’t remind me of any actor. He wasn’t handsome like my father, or as tall.

  “Welcome to Panama,” he said, extending his right hand to me, and I thought about how he had stolen my mother away from my father, without so much as a second thought. Still I shook his strong coarse hand and then watched as he kissed and hugged my mother. They acted like they hadn’t seen each other in weeks.

  “Your mother has waited a long time for this moment, and I am honored,” he said. I could hear Carol back in Los Feliz at Yoga Vibe saying, “Exhale the bad energy out, inhale calmness” so I inhaled, “Nice to meet you,” I said, as I let a deep breath out.

  “Come, let me show you your own cabin,” she said, and we left Santiago by the front door. I had to laugh as she unlatched the gate to the dairy cow pasture. Six light brown dairy cows were grazing near the unpainted one-room cabin. That looked like a shack. She opened the door and we stepped into a potter’s studio with pottery stacked up on wall-to-wall shelves. In the left corner near a single window was a twin bed with a mosquito net over it. There were three hanging lamps and wire hooks for my clothes, and a wooden milk-carton as a night table. The floor around the bed was made from colorful handmade tiles.

  “I made the tiles. I started with bowls and cups, but then I just found tile making more enjoyable,” she said.

  I put my LV suitcase down and hung up my white linen jacket, which I didn’t need because of the Panama heat. I looked at my Smartphone—it had no signal.

  “My cell phone’s dead. Where should I charge it?” I asked anxiously.

  “We don’t have internet, cable, or TV access, just a landline phone,” she said, like it was something she was proud of.

  “What?” I asked, suddenly feeling like my oxygen supply was being cut off—and I didn’t have anything to save me.

  “If you need the phone, just help yourself. We only use the internet when we’re in the city during the week,” she said.

  Oh, God, she wasn’t a cell phone or online woman; it was like she had gone back in time.

  “No worries,” I said, trying to sound as if I could make it through the weekend.

  “I’ll show you the outhouse, and then our house,” she said.

  “Outhouse?” I asked full of panic.

  “We’re used to it. And we’ve got an outdoor shower, too. But we bathe in the stream behind the coffee fields,” she said.

  “That’s different,” I said.

  The outhouse was an outhouse—if you’ve seen one, you’ve seen them all, even with the colorful tiles. Even with the smell of coffee wafting though the circular window—it was still an outhouse.

  Their unpainted house had only two rooms: a kitchen with a round table (like the one on the Charlie Rose show), and a bedroom.

  “Do you make enough money?” I asked, because I really wanted to know.

  “We sell our coffee to one major company in the U.S. and they sell it under their own label. We own the land on both sides,” Santiago said, defensively.

  “It’s the outhouse,” my mother said, winking at him.

  “Claro que si!” he said and they both laughed.

  “Let’s go for our walk. We always go for one around this time,” she said, and the three of us headed out to walk the coffee bean fields.

  We walked for over an hour from one end of the field to the other. This was how they stayed fit and trim. I acted like it was fun—but this over the Charles River, over Central Park, over walking along Malibu Beach—no thanks!

  After that she and I sat in brown corduroy upholstered armchairs while Santiago cooked us a vegetarian meal. They ate no meat; they hadn’t since re-locating to Panama. She talked about teaching English once a week and selling her pottery twice a month—the two jobs she did just for extra enjoyment. The main job and bliss was their coffee beans. We ate at the round table.

  And then she walked me back through the dairy cow pasture to my cabin.

  “I’m fine,” I said, not wanting her to come in.

  “I’ll just set the lights for you,” she said, and entered to turn on the lights, which ran on a battery timer, all except the one nearest to the bed.

  “You look wonderful,” she said.
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br />   “This is really what you wanted?” I asked, because I was done deep breathing. I was ready to fight for my father.

  “It might not seem glamorous, like a movie to you, but yes this is all I want,” she said.

  “You broke my father’s heart; you left him to question his ability to love anyone besides me.”

  “It wasn’t out of spite.”

  “You came back, after meeting Santiago in a burrito joint in Porter Square, and you started packing. You told my father, ‘I’m not in love with you anymore and I’m leaving,’ and that was it. I was there,” I said, finally telling her the story from my point of view.

  “I can hear your pain, but I chose my beating heart over obligation,” she said.

  “Obligation? That’s what we were to you?” I asked, my hands clenched.

  “Not you, but my marriage to your father. Only your Aunt Helen understood, and she told me to go, to follow my heart. I wanted to bring you.”

  “Go with you? Huh! I wouldn’t have left my father for this. For that guy,” I said.

  I was fuming with rage because she was like a lovesick puppy.

  “I knew nothing when I met your father. I was inexperienced, undeveloped; I was just following what people of my generation did. Santiago made my heart beat. I left your father for him; it was my first grown-up choice. I’m sorry I hurt you, I’m sorry I hurt your dad. I never planned on it, but I don’t regret my choice,” she said.

  “You’re the most selfish woman I know. I’m nothing like you. You’ve never come back to the States to check on me once, not for college graduation, not to see my Hollywood life, not for anything,” I said.

  “I’ve been too scared to return,” she said. Like that was an excuse.

  “You’re an American, in case you forgot. You should visit your own country.”

  “I’ve wanted to see you.”