As Simon looks at his mother, he suddenly feels he can see it, the poor organ ravaged by the years, a heart glowing wanly through her chest, asking for attention, for Frannie’s acts of meanness to finally be overlooked so that this rusted muscle, at once guilty and innocent, may be touched. He averts his eyes.
Frannie has retrieved her stuffed cat, which this time she has entirely removed from its wrapping, thereby disclosing that half its tail is missing.
“What in the world happened to it?” Carmen asks.
“I don’t know. The girl is coming by soon to bring me the missing part. I’m sure she tore it off to take revenge. She must be jealous.”
“Right,” Carmen sighs, trying to imagine the adorable student who minds her mother three days a week tearing off Bastard’s tail while Frannie was napping.
“I should always check what’s in her bag when she’s leaving,” Frannie adds. “They’re all thieves, those black women.”
“Mother!”
Carmen refrains from reminding her mother how much she herself was the victim of prejudice, and especially how she hated being subjected to those humiliating searches when she worked as a cleaning lady for the rich folks living in the hills. That was how she came to relieve her employers of their possessions. “They already take me for a thief, so what’s the point of being honest?” She was crafty and took only small objects, which she hid where she was sure not to be inspected: in her bra, between her then ample breasts. Simon tearfully rejected the toys she brought them, and Carmen ended up returning them to their owners on the sly. The story of her childhood: tacking between her mother’s misdemeanours and her brother’s inflexibility. She herself is amazed at having grown so upright. It seems to her she should have developed like those twisted trees that climb toward the sun while trying to escape from the insects.
Frannie is talking to the cat and the tension eases in the room; even the medical devices appear to be less fussy. Simon taps on his telephone, the nurses go by the room without stopping, and Carmen thinks she can hear the muscles of her mother’s heart contracting, stubborn and resistant. Unless it’s her own heart she hears.
Then the beating becomes more distinct and rapid, like an underground drumroll. For the second time this evening, Simon and Carmen exchange a tectonic look and, in unison, position themselves on either side of their mother, their bodies arched above her brittle limbs, praying for the ground not to open up beneath her bed. Frannie starts yelping, hugging Bastard tightly against her stomach, as the tremor seizes the entire building. The aftershock is more powerful than the initial earthquake—that, at least, is the impression conveyed by the vibrations rippling through the hospital. “There it is! This is it! The big one!” Frannie screams, before choking with a harrowing groan. Carmen grips the sides of the bed and tries to locate something stable, but her gaze registers nothing but movement. Even Simon appears blurred. She shuts her eyes.
When the tremor finally ends she is astonished to find the room practically intact. Then she straightens up and realizes she is mistaken. Eyes staring blankly, mouth agape, skin gone grey—Frannie is not intact. In a flash, Simon hits the emergency button and leans over her.
“She’s not breathing.”
He confidently begins to give her a heart massage. Moments later, a nurse arrives, exchanges a few words with Simon and immediately heads off to find a doctor. Carmen steps back with her thumb stuck between her teeth. The California coast has undoubtedly not sunk into the Pacific, but Frannie was right: this was indeed her big one.
When the doctor leaves the room, Frannie is still unconscious but under the sway now of a new cocktail of intravenous drugs. Her face is unrecognizable. Simon remembers when Claire’s father died a few years earlier. His features metamorphosed in the same way. It was as if some crucial chunk of the person had broken off, like the collapse of part of an ice field that leaves the whole disfigured. That’s what this heart attack was. The massive blow, the point of no return. From out of nowhere the tears well up and he turns away to hide them from Carmen. But she steps closer to him all the same and takes him by the shoulders.
“You saved her, Simon.”
“I don’t know.”
Is it really saving someone when she is very old, disease-ridden, filled with gall and bad blood to the point of paralysis? He did nothing but what he is conditioned to do: sustain life, maintain the order of things. Not let his mother die, no matter what. He curses his reflexes and curses himself for being unable to prevent the tremor, for not having foreseen the aftershock.
“If she had been sedated she wouldn’t have felt the earthquake. Her heart wouldn’t have given out.”
“It would have given out sooner or later. The doctor said so. It’s an old, worn-out muscle.”
A new medical team takes over the room to carry out further tests, and Carmen suggests they go have a bite in the cafeteria. Frannie’s condition is stable and, in any case, they’re obliged to leave the room. Simon realizes he’s famished and accepts. They find themselves once again walking along corridors cluttered with debris though looking less devastated than Frannie. When they reach their destination the door is locked. They’re told the tremor set off a small fire. The kitchen is closed until further notice.
They fall back on one of the many all-night taquerias near the Berkeley campus. Carmen takes the wheel and slaloms in and out of the branches and empty trashcans littering the streets, amid clusters of excited, zigzagging students. “You’d think it was Halloween,” she remarks as they enter the restaurant.
During the meal not a single word passes between them. Simon has an idea of what is going through his sister’s head. He remembers all too well Carmen’s Berkeley years. He would come to visit her, sleep on the floor of her co-op room, a squalid cubbyhole she shared with a corpulent girl whose snoring was horrendous; he woke up every hour, afraid of being attacked by a rat. At the outset, Carmen had planned to devote herself to mathematics, but after the first year she opted instead for Women’s Studies. She shaved her head and joined the row of activists who lined the campus’s main road and handed out radical leaflets to passersby on behalf of a small circle that published a monthly titled Queen Sappho. During that same period, Simon enrolled in the police academy and looked on his sister’s new interests with suspicion, especially after she was arrested while taking part in a rally. But he never stopped visiting her, and Carmen never once trotted out for him her anti-patriarchy spiel. Their relationship steered clear of the gender war.
A vagrant with a limp barges into the restaurant waving a battered Bible. Immediately, the kitchen staff arrive to usher him back out.
“The Last Judgment! It’s all written here! The earth has shaken; the time of reckoning has come for the wicked; the righteous shall be rewarded. The earth calls out for the truth!”
A few moments later, he is marshalled out into the shifting darkness of the street.
There is something rank about Carmen’s memories of her university years. Those were heady days, of course, and it was there she understood who she was. But when she thinks about the physical and ideological excesses she committed there, she feels nauseous. Looking at the students around them, she’s no longer able to feel the pulse of their wonderful naiveté and the enthusiasm of their first steps in the world; all she sees is their obnoxious smugness and radicalism.
Her best memories are of running in the Berkeley Hills. Each morning, no matter what had happened the night before, she would plunge into the fickle fragrances of the woods and climb to the highest point in the city, where she could plant her feet in the damp earth and contemplate the San Pablo reservoir on one side, San Francisco Bay on the other and, on clear days, picture the soft roof of San José to the southwest, under which her younger brother still lived.
Thinking back, she realizes the seeds of her future life lay in what she then considered secondary. It wasn’t the group that prevaile
d but her individuality; she was sustained not by her studies but by her passion for running—the abstract no longer dominated her existence. When her Olympic career ended the jobs she sought were exclusively down-to-earth, as she was incapable of re-immersing herself in the dialectics that she had donned out of the need to define her identity.
She manages to gobble down the last mouthful of her burrito, slightly ashamed of being so hungry while her mother is fighting for her life a few blocks away. The fact is, Frannie long ago imposed this detachment on her children. It would have been impossible for them to survive, to become full-fledged adults, had they let each of her mood swings affect them. Except that by protecting yourself from the bad, you also shield yourself from the good, from what’s essential. Her mother’s condition leaves Carmen in the grip of a strange to-and-fro between compassion and sadness, but she does not feel anxious. Does Simon feel the same detachment? Fidgeting with his empty Styrofoam coffee cup, he looks rather restless.
“Do you think that was the last time we could talk to her?” he asks.
Carmen gives him an I-don’t-know shrug.
“That would be a pity,” Simon continues. “She has things to tell us.”
Suddenly she understands the source of Simon’s agitation.
“That’s true,” she replies, “but even if she rallies, there’s no guarantee she’ll choose to tell us…”
Simon lowers his head. He’s thinking of their father, of course. After all these years, the questions, the investigations, the furtive searches through Frannie’s belongings, the contacts with other relations, this is their last hope. The possibility that at the eleventh hour their mother will finally remove the steel clamp that she’s kept on this secret.
Because of Frannie’s unflagging stubbornness, for a long time Simon held on to the idea that their father was a criminal. Soon after he’d earned his police badge, he began to nose around the prisons in search of a Hispanic who may have lived at one of their mother’s many former addresses. Carmen patiently followed him to the penitentiaries, where they met a dozen inmates with their chin, their eyebrows, a vague family likeness. None of them remembered Francisca Lopez, except one who no doubt was hoping this would get him paroled. That was a few months before Simon’s wedding. He would have liked to invite his father to the ceremony. Had he found him, Carmen tells herself, Simon might have made completely different choices. Perhaps he would not be married to Claire but to a generous woman who would respect him and not cheat on him with low-level management consultants. Perhaps if Simon found the answer to the oldest question of their existence, he would finally put an end to his rotten marriage.
As is always the case when Carmen thinks about her brother’s wife, she gets angry.
“How’s your new girlfriend doing?” Simon asks, as though he were reading her mind.
“It’s over.”
“Already?”
“It wasn’t working.”
“Come on!”
“I’m telling you, we were incompatible! And, just imagine, some people believe that being in an unhappy relationship is actually a legitimate reason to break up!”
“Stop. You don’t have children, so you can’t put yourself in my position.”
“Exactly.”
“What?”
Carmen looks away.
“She wanted a child? You refused? Carmen, how many lovers will you have to lose like this before you change your mind?”
“You know my views on the subject.”
“But you’re wrong! It’s not because we had Frannie for a mother that we’re doomed to repeat her mistakes. I’m very far from being the kind of parent she was for us.”
“Maybe. But you found yourself a woman who’s not so very far.”
“That’s not true. Claire may be cold, but she’s not crazy.”
“She’s incapable of loving.”
“Well, it appears that neither are you! You’re doing everything you can to remain alone.”
The brother gives the sister a foxlike stare, grabs his cup and goes for a refill. Carmen mulls over their conversation. He’s right, of course; her brother is always right, and at the same time always wrong. Because the love she has felt for him, ever since she stood at his side when he took his first steps, proves that she has won out. Children abandoned for days at a time, deprived of food by way of punishment or hit with vinyl records don’t all turn into monsters. Some become long-distance runners.
Outside, the rain is coming down again, blanketing the night in desolation. Couples in a hurry to lose their virginity run from one awning to the next to quickly reach the dormitories, miraculously deserted on this Sunday night. The coffee becomes more acid with every sip, and Simon drinks with no compassion for his stomach, which is about to cry out for mercy. He can’t help admitting his sister is partly right. What does he really know about children, about the science of transforming babies into happy adults? At thirteen, his son Alan never seems to aspire to be anything but a blob addicted to anime and Cheezies. As for his daughter, every inch of freedom she gains serves only to distance her from the values Simon is trying to instill in her, and to drive her ever farther into the fringes. When he decided to marry and start a family, Simon never would have believed you could feel so far removed from those to whom you were supposed to be closest.
“You know, I think it would do Jessica good to spend some time with you.”
“What makes you say that?”
“I don’t know. She’s changing.”
“Is she gay?”
“I don’t think so. She’s just… different. And the people she hangs out with… Maybe it’s a phase like the one you went through.”
“It’s not always merely a phase.”
Simon lets out a sigh. The coffee has already begun to stir up a revolt in his esophagus. He thinks of Jessica coming home the previous night at eleven and then stealing down the fire escape at one in the morning only to come back the same way at five a.m. by resorting to circus animal stunts. He thinks of the cans of spray paint, the crowbar, and the other tools he found stashed away in her closet. He sees the crumpled leaflet in her wastepaper basket, full of coded directions, and the photos of an old military bunker hidden under her mattress. Whenever he rummages through his daughter’s things, it’s in search of drugs, condoms—the usual smoking guns of adolescent girls. But what he finds is far more troubling and enigmatic.
It was much easier to confirm that Claire was cheating on him. All he needed was to rifle through her sports bag, in which some perfectly clean clothes concealed a set of black lace underwear. Oddly enough, he admires the complexity of his daughter’s secret. She, at least, doesn’t reduce Simon to a pathetic cliché. He has never spoken to Claire about his discoveries—the ones concerning her infidelities aren’t worth the trouble and those about Jessica are too bizarre. He refuses to submit them to his wife’s insipid reactions.
“Do you remember Marcus Wilson?” Carmen asks, rousing him from his musings.
She, too, can’t help thinking about their father tonight. Simon nods, his thoughts flooded with memories. They were fourteen and sixteen years old. Frannie, exasperated by their relentless questions about their background, had ordered them to take a large umbrella and wait for her in the car. They drove for an hour through a downpour to a rain-soaked cemetery on a hillside. There, Frannie furiously led them to the modest tombstone of one Marcus Wilson, then twelve years dead.
“That’s him, your father. He was a boozer and he killed himself driving home from a bar when you were little. Now don’t bother me about this again!”
She turned on her heel as furiously as she had come, leaving her son and daughter alone at the graveside. Carmen cried, and Simon followed suit, not so much out of sadness as the wish to behave appropriately. Actually, it took him several weeks to digest this revelation and incorporate it into his personal hist
ory. He had a father, the father had a name, an age that would never change, a final abode.
For almost a year Carmen and he paid regular visits to Marcus Wilson’s grave, timidly at first and then unabashedly, leaving flowers and candies, stretching out to finally be able to speak to their father. Carmen asked him to help her get a high score on her SAT. Simon sometimes went there alone to confide his anxieties about girls, about Frannie’s fits of rage. He could sit there for hours leaning his back against the granite headstone.
They might have kept up this routine their whole lives, if only Frannie had chosen a more remote, more anonymous monument of someone the world had forgotten. But when Simon and Carmen arrived at the cemetery to picnic, in June of the year following their first meeting with Marcus Wilson, they found three people gathered at the gravestone, an old woman and two young men in their early twenties, all of them African American.
Simon wanted to turn back immediately, but Carmen couldn’t help approaching the family, so he kept his distance while she interrupted their prayers. She came back a few minutes later looking crushed. The two boys were Marcus Wilson’s sons and the old woman, his mother. Wilson had died after a five-year battle with cancer.
“He was buried here because this was his home town, but he died in Chicago. He was living there with his family. He couldn’t have known mother, much less have two children—two Latino children—by her.”
It took them months to tell Frannie they had discovered the truth. When they finally dared to do so, she had no idea what they were talking about. The cemetery, the rain, Marcus Wilson—all forgotten.
A lull in the downpour allows them to return to the car without being swallowed whole. Carmen’s Jeep is covered with white disks; some youngsters have been playing Frisbee with paper plates from the nearby pizzeria. Simon is itching to have a few words with some of them, but Carmen manages to distract him by asking him to check the oil. While he is busy under the hood, an elderly woman stops beside her.
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