by Joan Silber
On the street in Miami I sometimes drew from men a blind fury for being a woman in a short skirt who was certainly never, ever going to fuck them. People hated privilege, however they saw it. You could walk into a spot where the lilt of your stride was unbearable to someone. What the cop wanted to tell me was that it was his country.
I was bitter against Gina for never having told me that travel took you to this. But the cop had not only resented me, if you could call it that. He had wanted to cow me. At the very least. And I was thoroughly cowed now, wasn’t I, a wincing American female in her bedclothes. I hated what I was.
“OKAY,” I SAID TO Gina the next day. “Don’t take this personally, but I have to go home. On the next bus. Tomorrow morning, I mean. Will you tell María I said goodbye?” Outside a rooster was crowing, though it was hours past dawn.
“This guy came,” I said. Later I got much better at telling the story, but the first time I made a botch of it. I said he grabbed my tit and she said what an asshole. I saw how little language we had—Gina and I—for the deeper forms of dread. We’d done fine leaning on our hardiness before, but we were way past this right now, in another territory entirely.
“Oh, Kit,” Gina said, and reached to hug me. She was a mother, after all. For about a second I liked being comforted. “I have to start packing,” I said
“You know,” Gina said, “I could leave with you, if you want. Except that I just started sleeping with Fritz, and I really like this house, so I couldn’t right away.”
“Don’t go!” Emmy said.
Phoebe got wind of what the talk was about and she yelled, “No! No! Not going!” and ran around the room in crazy circles.
In the end I stayed because I was too chicken to travel on the bus alone with just Phoebe. That was not what I told people. I said you could not let fascist creeps like that run your life. For a week I hardly went out, though I knew I was hiding out in the exact spot where it had happened. He could come back. Even people who were trying to reassure me said that. Who could stop him, what reason did he have to hesitate? I made Gina give away every last bit of dope we had, the really good stuff from Fritz and the mushrooms too, whose sacred world-dissolving qualities I had so liked. When at last I took myself outside, most of the Mexicans on the street did not look much less wary than I was: it was instructive to notice this. I supposed they had reasons to be afraid of each other.
And I stuck close to Gina. If she was going to the market, if she was taking the local pickup truck shuttle to San Juan Chamula, if she was taking a hike with Fritz, couldn’t Phoebe and I come along? Our little group had done things together before but not quite as incessantly. I lost all savor for independence, for discovering hidden bits of the city on my own.
I tried to keep the cop story from Phoebe, but she heard parts of it and wailed in fright. I had to assure her that people on the street were really nice, most people were nice; I had to keep her from becoming a three-year-old bigot.
At night in our room, I heard him outside laughing with his friends. I heard him on the roof. I heard him rustling through the courtyard. The relief when these sounds dissipated did not make me forget he might come back. What could keep him out, what bar could hold the door against him?
The Americans who showed up at the house all had theories. Anthony said, “They hear our rock ’n’ roll and they think every American wants sex all the time.” Howie said, “The cop was enacting a revision of the La Malinche story, the thing where Cortés gets this Indian woman as his mistress and she betrays her people. Think of yourself as a historical reversal.” I had been thinking it might be good to have a boyfriend here, but these guys, whom I’d liked well enough before, seemed young and lightweight, not much better than watching out for myself. I got a little rep in town for being snooty.
Gina lost interest in backstrap weaving, which she said was too hard—you needed a graph to follow the design and you worked for hours and you got nothing done—and she was otherwise occupied with Fritz. I was afraid to go to María’s without her—worried about what I might run into on the outskirts where María lived and afraid that going there might inflame my cop, if he happened to be watching.
I WROTE TO DOUG IN MIAMI.I wish you were here but you’re not. I know I have my own fate but sometimes I wish things were easier. Oh, well, life is a struggle. Phoebe had stomach trouble for a week, but we coped. Hope you are doing well whatever you’re doing. Con amistad, Kit. I knew it was a coy and transparently self-pitying note, but I had too much longing in me not to send it. I wanted Doug feeling terrible that he’d thrown me out in the world unguarded and exposed, though in fact I had left him.
I wrote it on a postcard of Zinacántan men at a festival but I sealed it in an envelope so his new what’s-her-name wouldn’t see it. It was just as well he didn’t answer, though I hoped he had, every time I waited for my mail in the lista de correos line at the post office.
PHOEBE WAS ALREADY complaining that she didn’t ever, ever want to leave Mexico. Not ever. “Well, sweetie,” I said, “prepare yourself.” My high school science teacher, Mr. Llewellyn, liked to give his classes mock-lectures on the law of inertia. “You objects at rest out there,” he’d say, “please think of me as the unbalanced force altering your state.” He was English (exotic for Florida) and fetchingly sardonic, I’d thought. My boyfriend Toby had been his pet. I was missing Florida all the time now, it was from being lonely.
BY THE TIME I SAW Doug again—that winter, when I took Phoebe to Miami—I had long stopped sounding forlorn about being solo and unprotected, and I leaned instead on the bragging side of it. You would have thought I was utterly at my ease the whole time in San Cristóbal, to hear me talk about it. Even the cop at the door had become an emblem of all I now knew, an emblem of my daring, even.
I told the story so often that the outlines of it grew a shape and the elements were the same each time, not anything to shriek about. When people did shriek—“What did you do?”—I was the one shrugging, used to what the world was, used to trouble. And Miami didn’t scare me one fucking bit now.
The winter I came back from Mexico, Doug was doing just fine. He had moved to a bigger house, a glassy ranch with a vast living room his girlfriend had decorated in white leather and apricot velvet and teak. Phoebe came in showing off a woven purse that María had given her on one of our visits, and it gave me a queer feeling to see the intricate, bright threading, the patterns of long labor, in that setting. A house like Doug’s was very unusual in the world, I thought.
MY MOTHER TOLD ME that Toby had gone to live in a country in Asia. Not Vietnam, of course. Maybe Hong Kong—was that a country?—or Thailand. “You know, if you’d stayed with him,” she said, “you could be living in a big house over there with servants.” Since Toby had gone abroad specifically to marry someone else, this seemed like a bit of twisted reasoning to me.
“Oh, Mom,” I said, “what makes you think I want a house like that?”
“You wouldn’t like it? I just want you to be happy, sweetie.”
I said I wasn’t sure someone living as a colonial could ever really be happy, which made no sense to my mother.
“Just tell any fellow who wants to marry you,” she said, “that you don’t want everything too fancy or easy or better than everybody else. They’ll be glad to hear it! I can hear the sounds of relief already!”
I did just that, of course, though by the time this question came up it went without saying. There was agreement on it, whatever other disputes there were between me and the men I picked to live with. Certain leanings, certain principles, were set in me by then. Tell your many husbands.
THE MEN I LIVED with were decent people—there were two while Phoebe was young—but it couldn’t be said that they protected me. It was too late for that. Julius, whom I was with for three years in Miami and who taught Phoebe to ride a bike, used to tell me I was too independent, an odd thing to say as an insult. And he said it from fondness, from love mixed with vanity.
> What did he mean? The time my car broke down on the highway all the way over near Naples, when I was going to a demonstration against draining the Everglades, I didn’t call him to come get me (Triple-A came). When my mother was in the hospital and I had a big argument with the doctor, I didn’t think to get Julius to show up and argue for me. I forgot I could, or I didn’t believe it would help. I wasn’t past all comfort, but not at the times he thought. Julius said I didn’t want him in the way, which was not entirely wrong, though I denied it.
AFTER JULIUS AND I SPLIT UP, I worked in a day-care center. Mr. Llewellyn, the Brit who taught me science in high school, used to say that kids taught him the meaning of sacrifice. In truth, I liked the feel of emptying myself out for them, of rising to the task of letting them wear me out. It used the better parts of me.
I dressed in skinny jeans and tank tops for work, but something prim stayed with me from corralling the kids at school, and Randy was surprised to hear that I had indeed been on the back of a motorcycle before. We met at a rally in a park celebrating the news that President Carter had just pardoned the Vietnam draft dodgers. Randy was on the stage playing his drum in a rock band that did a sarcastic version of “From the Halls of Montezuma.” I was at the front of the crowd and we were eyeing each other while the tune rolled on. Once the music was over and the equipment hauled offstage, he found his way to where I stood and asked me where I got the stitched woolen purse I was carrying (a Chamula bag from San Cristóbal). He didn’t give a rat’s ass about my accessories—if I’d been carrying a plastic bag, he would’ve asked about that—but it got us into a little conversation about places we’d traveled. He’d done the overland trail to Afghanistan. “You don’t forget mountains like that,” he said. “But cold. And they don’t drink! I like drugs as well as the next person but it was a hard climate to handle without alcohol.”
“You look sturdy,” I said.
“You think so?” he said. “Keep looking. Please.”
I’d come with friends, but they dispersed tactfully once they saw what was happening. Randy loped back to the truck where his drums were and had a conference with the guys before we went off for an alleged beer. I got on the back of his motorcycle, with my arms around his waist, trying not to burn my shins when we went roaring away. It was hard to hear him speak, but we understood each other fine, and we drove straight to his crappy little studio apartment and hopped into bed in about two seconds flat. The directness of our ardor made us fall intermittently into comradely laughter, but when things got more serious, he had streaks of elegance I had not expected.
The sweet thoroughness of his methods meant that, after everything hit a naturally spectacular conclusion, I had to leap out of bed to go pick up Phoebe from a third-grader’s birthday party. I’d come to the rally in a friend’s car, and I was very apologetic about making Randy put on his clothes to take me across town. “Hey,” he said. “I’m a lucky man to be your ride.” The eight- and nine-year-old girls, who were out in the yard, were thrilled at the sight of a motorcycle with a mother on it. “Hi, birthday beauties,” he said. Phoebe wanted to get on board at once. She actually said, “I love your machine.” In the name of safety I walked her home; we weren’t far. We yelled together—in delight—when we got to our building and there he was (I’d just given him my address). “It’s old me again,” he said.
And after that he was pretty much with us all the time, except when he was on the road. He was very good with Phoebe—he did silly voices, he played tunes on the table with forks, he nicknamed her shoes—he was goofy and hammy, a happy performer. If we went to the grocery store, he could do a fabulous imitation of the clerk when we got home. He was very quick, a truly sage observer, and only sounded like a dumb rock musician when he was drunk or tired.
His drums stayed at his friend’s and there didn’t seem to be a lot of rehearsing. His friends were tedious and dopey and burned cigarette holes in the carpet, so I had him see them without me. Every so often the band would finally manage to line up some gigs and he’d be gone for a few months. Phoebe blamed me for this—“Why can’t we go to Birmingham with him? Why not?”—and when Randy got around to phoning, it was always two in the morning, after she’d gone to bed.
I never thought he was reliable—I was not entirely stupid—and I did my best not to let Phoebe expect too much. That didn’t work either; it only got her incensed at my slander and furious with me. And then he’d come home, puffed up with road stories—who needed to hear about the bass player’s swallowing the worm in the mezcal bottle or the rainstorm that got them lost in Tuscaloosa? But he brought us hilarious souvenirs—a plastic alligator that sang “Dixie,” a toy toaster with prayers printed on fake bread. We were never anything but exhilarated and wildly relieved to see him.
Was I too old for this shit, as Gina, who lived in Austin with Fritz but still phoned now and then, asked. I thought not. It felt perfectly natural. I had a taxing job in a sad, crazy inner city day-care center, I had a high-energy daughter who needed more of me than I could give. Having a fun boyfriend who breezed in and out and didn’t ask much was not the worst thing.
RANDY WAS ALWAYS going to take us traveling, maybe to Thailand, so highly recommended by Gina. My high school science teacher had once lived there too and spoken very fondly of it. But we needed more money to do that, and we never had it. I was sort of carrying Randy financially as it was. Another thing Gina resented. “What do you call a rock musician who’s just split up with his girlfriend?” she asked me. “You know. Homeless.” (Her other favorite was: “What do you call a guy who hangs out with musicians? A drummer.”)
But I knew I was lucky, compared, for instance, with some of the mothers of kids at my day-care center. One contingent—the hard-luck moms, some of them still in their teens, with their drawn-on lipstick and their butt-clinging shorts, with bad skin and sandpaper voices and guys who were wrecking everything in sight—eyed me as if it was really too much that someone like me could get what I had.
If Randy came to get me after work, at least one mother would tell me how cute my novio was. “Tell your kids to be nice to my baby,” he’d say.
Phoebe wanted to know if novio meant fiancé. “Only sometimes,” I said.
IN THE THIRD YEAR we were together, the band had such a long dry spell that Randy got side work with a friend’s combo that did weddings and bar mitzvahs. He’d gel back his hair and turn into a twinkling rascal in a tux. He swore he could get the oldest, driest, meanest guests to get out on the dance floor and shake it, and he probably could.
At home we were always giving Phoebe dance lessons. This meant exhibition numbers in which the adults did astounding twirls and leaps and slinks, and group events in which Phoebe named the dances (“Do the cockroach! Do the refrigerator!”) or we lapsed into slam-dancing.
Well, it wasn’t all so sweet. When Phoebe was throwing a tantrum or bratting out, Randy would curse in snorting disgust and get out of the room fast. Once, when he was taking her across town for ice cream, he left her at the Dairy Queen alone out of outrage.
I didn’t want to marry him. My mother asked me what I was saving myself for. “Nothing,” I said. “This is my real life now.” When I got dressed in the morning and Randy was still in bed, he’d say, “Look at you. I can’t get over it. I never will.” A man who spoke like a country-music lyric—what was so bad about that? We got along. Perhaps we couldn’t have lasted for years without his long spells on the road. I liked those months alone, with no one to please, and then the joyful returns.
His longest time away was a western tour, to Nevada and Idaho and towns I never heard of. The Dakotas? They were north of what? I tried to train him to phone before midnight. We were having a crisis at work because a four-year-old boy had had his leg broken by his father. Phoebe was very upset when I made the mistake of telling her. She woke up crying, from nightmares that seemed to be about Mexico, which I didn’t even think she remembered. So I wasn’t always fascinated when Randy wanted t
o tell me about the giant statue of a potato in some town or the bartender who made margaritas by juggling. Randy himself was too old for this shit, I thought.
I sank to questions about the weather. “Cold here, kitten,” he’d say. “Can’t wait to get back.”
I RAN INTO the bass player’s girlfriend, sappy Shelley, while I was buying Phoebe’s favorite kind of frozen banana bars to get her through the night. “Long winter without the guys,” I said.
“I know,” she said. “It’s so great to have them back. This month has been a great gift.”
This month? This what? I wasn’t cool enough to hide my raging astonishment, my thundering openmouthed fury, and I embarrassed poor Shelley.
“He’ll come home, honey,” she said. “I just know it.”
HE DID CALL, as he’d been calling all along, and he was a little mortified but unsurprised to be found out. “Yeah, well,” he said. “I took more time.” Her name was Nicole and she lived in Billings, Montana, and I wouldn’t let him tell me any more. What did he think he was doing? He didn’t exactly know. “I wouldn’t have lied if I’d known,” he said. “You know that.”
I wasn’t interested. I said that and I mostly meant it. No more. Enough. “You’re not a good idea,” I said.
“Hey, girl,” he said, “is that your worst insult?” He seemed to think he was still someone I wanted to talk to.
My days weren’t so different without him either. My life was full of things that had nothing to do with him. At the day-care center, the boy with the broken leg had stopped speaking to any of the other kids or the teachers either. We were trying to get him moved to his aunt’s. Phoebe was not doing her homework in middle school—she had decided there was no point. We were so busy shouting about this that she cut back on asking when Randy was coming home. What if he showed up in town with what’s-her-name? It was not something I could think much about. It was a stone in the throat, a heel on the chest.