by Lori Carson
“What do you have for me?” Harry asks, rubbing his hands together.
I rummage through my big bag, trying to decide which of the two tapes to give him first, and hand him the cassette of the homemade demos. At the last second, I change my mind. “Wait, listen to this one first. Track three.”
“Still True” still sounds pretty good to me. It’s the strongest of my older songs. We sit in silence while it plays. He closes his eyes and nods his head. I can tell by the way he’s listening that it’s a good one to have started with. Three minutes and forty-something seconds go by.
“Nice tune,” he says when it’s done.
“Thanks.” I’m playing with a rubber band I’ve taken from the edge of his desk, twisting it around my wrist and fingers.
“I don’t remember it from the other night.”
“No, it’s an older song,” I explain. “I try to play new stuff at the open mic.”
“Pretty. I like it. What else you got?”
I hand him the other tape. He puts it into the cassette deck and presses play. The murkiness of the recording is a shock after the pristine sound of the first demo and I can tell he’s confused. He listens for a couple of minutes and then shuts it off.
“You’re a real talent,” he says. “No doubt about that. The question is what to do with you.”
I don’t know what that means, but it doesn’t sound good. Harry talks about himself for a while and then plays me a song by a singer he says he discovered last year. I nod my head and pretend to like it.
Before we say good-bye, he gives me a tour of the office, introduces me to the hip, young people who work there, and fills my bag with CDs of all the new Church Records releases.
Outside his door, he shakes my hand. “Stay in touch,” he says. “Let me know when you’re playing next.”
“I will,” I say, but life gets busy, and I never contact him again.
Sixty-three
When Jill Woo comes to the apartment, I attempt to give her the benefit of the doubt, but it isn’t easy. She’s tall, taller than I am, with flawless skin and symmetrical features. Her long black hair sways back and forth as she crosses the room.
“Hi, Ms. Nelson,” she says to me, and I notice how poised she is, how careful and precise her diction. Not a passionate girl, this one. She won’t be carried away by love.
Still, in the year since I caught the two of you in bed, things seem to have progressed between you. At fifteen, you’re in love for the first time and speak of Jill with every sentence. She seems to be willing to go along with it at least.
“Jill is so smart.”
“Jill is such a great basketball player.”
“Jill’s going to be in Seventeen magazine!”
You refer to her as your girlfriend, though I have my doubts as to whether she’d do the same. I can see the way she keeps her options open. She’s like the boys I used to choose, basking in your adoration but turning away from you as you lie on the floor in front of the TV. I come in with a bowl of popcorn and see you stroke her arm. It’s always you doing the reaching, while Jill leans back and coolly receives. She teases you for wearing your jeans too often. She tells you you should cut your beautiful hair. She pinches your skin at the waist. “Spare tire,” she says, laughing, so you refuse to eat the fattening desserts you love.
But one day, you come home from school and throw your book bag onto the table. “I broke up with Jill,” you say.
“What happened?” I ask from the kitchen where I’m unpacking groceries. I try to hide my relief.
“We’ve been fighting a lot.”
“You want a cup of tea?”
“Sure,” you say.
So I make us some tea and join you at the table. “How are you feeling?” I ask.
You look so serious and lovely, Minnow. Your nutty-brown hair falling in waves past your shoulders. You wear a crisp, white shirt, a navy A-line skirt, and heavy black shoes.
“I feel okay.” I watch you spoon three heaping sugars into your tea. “I felt a little dizzy at first, and my stomach hurt, but then I was kind of relieved.”
“Yeah?”
“Uh-huh, because sometimes it was exhausting, trying to be good enough for her.”
“You’re too good for her,” I can’t help myself from saying.
“Of course you think that. You’re my mother. But with Jill, everything always has to be so perfect, and I’m not like that. I like to relax.”
I can’t help but smile at this, my relaxed, superachiever, A-student daughter.
A few days later, Gabriel calls to say he’s finally making good on his threat. He plans to run for political office in the fall. He asks me how I’d feel about your spending the summer with him, in his country, to help work on his campaign. “It would be very interesting for her,” your father says. “To learn about the political process, to find out Greenwich Village is not the center of the world.”
“What about your family?” I ask. “Does your mother even know about her?”
“Of course she does!” He’s offended. “Everyone is dying to meet her. She’ll have the time of her life.”
I think about my own trip to Gabriel’s country, in the early eighties. Gabriel and I had been together for a year or so. He’d told me all about his beloved country, about the mountains of Terra Azul, where you can see two oceans from one patch of grass.
When we first arrived at the airport, your father ran ahead, leaving me to trail behind with our bags. I was alone going through customs when the immigration officers confiscated my passport, looking for a bribe. They were embarrassed when they found out I was with Gabriel, but they kept it just the same. Your father told me not to worry about it, and we left for our hotel. Later, he called the office of the president and explained what had happened. My passport mysteriously appeared at the front desk the next day.
Would I sleep a single night if I gave you permission to spend the summer with Gabriel in his country? “Let me get back to you,” I say now. “I need to talk to her, see what she wants to do, and I really need to think about it.”
“Okay,” he says. “But think fast. Tell Minnow I’ll speak to her on Friday.”
“I will.”
Sixty-four
Mom,” you say. “What do you think about true love?”
I’m deep into a beautiful story by Alice Munro and reluctantly put the book aside. “True love? I’m not sure what you’re asking, honey.”
“Well, do you think that there is just one person that, you know, you’re meant to be with?”
“I don’t believe that, no,” I say.
“But I’ve heard you say that Gabriel is the only man you’ve ever really loved,” you say.
It probably is what I believe, mistakenly, for myself. Even so, I have no doubt that you will love again. You’re asking me, of course, because your heart is hurting. The pain of ending a relationship is tricky, Minnow. It comes in waves. It’s going to get worse before it gets better.
“I think if there is such a thing as true love, then being with that person would allow you to relax and be yourself,” I tell you. “Your true love would never ask you to become someone different from who you are.”
You’re a smart girl and this makes sense to you. It doesn’t take away the hurt, but I can see it gives you hope.
That’s when it occurs to me that a change of scenery will do you good. When I tell you about Gabriel’s invitation, it lifts your spirits instantly. “Can I call him right now?” you ask excitedly.
“Go ahead,” I say, trying to allow the prospect of your happiness to outweigh my fears. After you tell him, you hand the phone to me. “You’d better take good care of my girl,” I say to Gabriel.
“Don’t worry,” he says, as if my worrying is only a nuisance.
Sixty-five
Gabriel makes all the arrangements for your trip. He sends you a thousand dollars to buy a suitcase and some new clothes. We go shopping at Macy’s without once having to worry about
what everything costs. There’s no time to send away for your passport, so we take the plane ticket downtown to the passport office and they put a rush on it.
On the day of the trip, you’re too excited to sit still and pace back and forth from window to window. I place my hands on your shoulders to steady you, and we both breath a deep sigh. We’re to meet him at JFK, where the two of you will fly together to Gabriel’s country. I think about the first time I ever traveled internationally, also with your father. I remember sitting beside him on the plane to Athens. His ease and confidence were a comfort to me. I slept most of the way with my face buried against his chest. I felt like a child but he seemed like a man.
We hail a taxi on Sixth Avenue and, in just a few minutes, are on the FDR, heading out of town. Through the window I can see the ferries and tugboats on the East River, the buildings of Long Island City.
“What if it’s weird, Mom?” you ask. “I’ve never spent a whole summer with him before. What if I get scared?”
“If it gets weird, or you get scared, or you don’t want to be there for any reason, you can come home.”
“It might be a lot of fun, though,” you say. “Gabriel said I could go horseback riding, and working on his campaign is going to be cool.”
I’m more nervous than you are, so I try not to say too much. You’ve always loved meeting people, found them interesting and easy to talk to. You’re fearless about new situations. I’m the one who’s too often afraid. I look away from you so you won’t see my eyes fill with tears. I feel like I’m handing you off to him so he can open the world up to you.
The taxi speeds along, going seventy miles per hour, and I send up a prayer for a traffic jam to slow us down. It’s all going too fast. Time seems to be accelerating, rushing ahead, moving faster and faster. I want to stop it now, to roll it backward. I want to hold the baby you were in my arms, to feel your soft cheek against my lips, to see you raise yourself on chubby legs, to hear you learn to speak. I want to put off the moment, fast approaching, when we’re going to have to say good-bye.
Sixty-six
There’s a heat wave that summer that seems to go on and on. The air feels liquid. It’s uncomfortable to breathe. I wake up in the morning, feed the cat, the fish, and the guinea pigs, make the bed, and put on water for coffee. The quiet of being alone doesn’t bother me. It’s just strange, at first, not to hear you in the shower, rushing around to get ready, talking on the phone. In fifteen years we’ve never been apart longer than the ten days I opened for Charlotte Winter.
When I’m not working, I sit on the terrace and play the guitar, or fill the hours cleaning out closets and organizing cupboards. I wash the windows and the floors with white vinegar and hot water, the way Maria once taught me. I think of her whenever I do housework. I hear her accented voice saying, “Now, she knows how to clean.”
Maria and Hector are living in a town called Shirley, now, on eastern Long Island, close to her son and his family. She hasn’t recovered from her stroke the way her doctor said she might. It’s been a long time since I’ve seen her, but she is often on my mind.
Outside, I hear the roar of a motorcycle and look down to the street to see Carl waving up at me from his bike. My boyfriend, that summer, is a twenty-two-year-old, Harley-riding, English busboy, a beautiful lad I met at a bar, out for a drink one night with the girls from my office.
“Hi,” I call to him through the window. The heat is so thick that it wiggles the air. “Want to come up?”
“Come for a ride,” he calls, and holds out the helmet he’s brought for me. I’m afraid of motorcycles, but tell him I’ll throw on a pair of jeans and be right down.
Gracefully, we weave through traffic, the eyes of drivers and pedestrians upon us. Carl is the sort you trust at the wheel. He can build an engine from a pile of nuts and bolts. He’s also good with a pool cue. I hold on to him and feel the oblique muscles along his sides, the bones of his back and rib cage. He’s tall and lean, with curly reddish hair already beginning to thin at the crown. His skin is white and softly freckled. He thinks he’s in love with me.
We don’t speak as the wind whistles through our helmets. There’s no way to hear a thing over the roar of the Harley. But even later, on the quiet City Island dock, which is where he takes me, our attempts at conversation seem to miss. He’s just a boy, and I don’t give him half a chance. He’s someone to have fun with, to sleep with, but too willing and gentle to be more.
He pours some water, from a plastic bottle in his backpack, onto a handkerchief, and presses it against my neck, shoulders, face, and chest. Even the breeze off the Hudson River feels hot as breath.
His lips are full and soft beneath my own. His tongue darts in and out. “You make me so horny,” he says.
“Don’t say that,” I scold him. “It makes you sound fourteen.”
“Oh, pardon me, Grandma,” he says, unhooking my bra with one hand and cupping my breast with the other.
Marry him, the breeze whispers. But I break his heart instead.
Many years later, when the Internet is reconnecting every old lover and classmate, I get an e-mail from Carl. He’s become a professional kickboxer in Thailand, he writes. I can still feel his wound in the way he phrases the greeting, as if offering up his throat to be cut or kissed.
He pushes me back on the hard dock now, licks my breasts, and gently blows on my nipples. “How does that feel?”
“Don’t ask,” I say. “Just do it.”
He undoes his pants and pushes his way inside me, roughly, the way I like it. He’d prefer to be gentle, to whisper tender words, but he wants to please me. The moment of penetration, of being entered, is like forgetting. It always takes me by surprise.
Later, we go to an East Village bar full of restaurant workers and English boys. He challenges one to a game of pool. We drink a couple of shots, a pitcher of beer, and then another round. Too drunk to walk, I attempt to crawl to the restroom on my hands and knees. Carl pulls me to my feet, laughing. He can hold his liquor. He reaches into the pockets of my jeans looking for another twenty.
“Wait.” My words slur. “I think I need to go home.”
“Just one more,” says Carl. He holds me upright with one arm and opens the ladies’ room door with the other.
In the morning the phone rings ten times before it wakes me. My head is splitting, my mouth full of cotton. The night before is a mixed-up blur. I have a vague memory of pushing Carl out the door while he begged me to stay. “Food poisoning,” I tell Arnie, my boss. He’s called to ask where the hell I am. My ten o’clock is waiting.
My hangover feels like the flu, and I’m sick for a day and a half, but by the weekend Carl is outside, calling up to me, and we do the whole thing again. We do it so often that summer; it becomes routine.
Sixty-seven
Every day when I get home, I listen for the sound of your voice on the answering machine. I play your messages over and over. Finally, a letter arrives from you, just after the Fourth of July.
Dear Mom,
How are you?
Today we visited Coiba, an island that once was a prison for politicos, but now is known for its luxury resort. The prison is still here although there aren’t many prisoners left. They sweep the beach for the tourists.
I’m having a wonderful time. Mi abuela, Nora, is very funny. Even though she’s divorced from Gabriel Sr., she keeps a chair for him at the table. He comes to dinner almost every night. He likes to tell outlandish stories. Gabriel says not to believe a word he says. I have so many relatives here, aunts and uncles and cousins. Many of them have the same names, which is confusing! They all talk and ask questions at the same time, but my Spanish is getting better! Maria would be very proud of me.
Everywhere we go it’s like being in a parade. People surround Gabriel and want to shake his hand. He stops and talks to every one of them, old man, housewife, or pretty girl. He never gets tired of it. There’s a lot of excitement about the election, and I think he
’s going to win.
How are Tiger, Z, Cinnamon, and Goldy? I miss you all very much.
Love & xoxoxoxoxox,
Minnow
Sixty-eight
Your daughter is a lesbian,” Gabriel says. He’s called before nine in the morning.
“Yeah, so what?” I’m hungover and in no mood for his crap.
“So what is, let’s hope the newspapers don’t get ahold of it. Illegitimate, lesbian daughter of candidate Gabriel Luna!”
“Oh, relax,” I tell him. “How did you find out, anyway?”
“She told me,” he says. “I told her she was too young to know what she is. I told her it was your fault. I think you raised her to be a man-hater.” He starts to lecture me about his mother and grandmother, who were good role models and made him the man he is today. I’m too tired to argue, and he can feel it. He’s called looking for a fight and is disappointed. “Hey, what’s wrong with you? You sound like the living dead.”
Without you, Minnow, I’ve lost my bearings. I’m rudderless in high winds, adrift at sea, shipwrecked on a lonely island.
On a Saturday evening, I follow behind a family on Sixth Avenue, two parents and three children. The husband and wife hold hands. The kids race one another to the corner. As I watch them, it strikes me that this is the real treasure of life, walking home with your own family on a summer night.
Approaching the apartment, I see Carl waiting for me with a six-pack of Guinness under his arm. He stands back while I open the door and follows me upstairs. How strange it is, I think, to be spending my days and nights with strangers: real estate clients and a boy too young to understand anything. Why haven’t I made a safe nest for us the way everyone else seems to? Even Alan, my faithful holdout, has plans to marry his girlfriend in the spring.
Carl and I drink the Guinness until it’s gone. “Want to shoot some pool?” he asks.
“Sure,” I say, and so we head over to the East Village bar.
There are so many nights like this, they blend into one. A hot summer hallucination of Harley rides, playing pool, and making love on sweat-soaked sheets, stinking of alcohol.