All My Relations

by Christopher McIlroy

  “Roger, I’m levitating.” It was true, since hearing his casual surf’s-up California voice, I’d been spiraling upward. Though fighting to stay put, I was rushing higher at incredible velocity. “Yes,” I said. “I’m going, I’m going.”

  Mother’s face closed as if a curtain had dropped. I promised to send money toward live-in help, which I’ve done.

  “I can’t understand this one, Claire,” Dad said. “It’s a heavy blow.”

  Putting over in Tucson to liquidate my possessions—meager as they were, more a case of erasing my tracks—of course I had to include Leah. I gave her most of the clothes. We’re about the same height. She invited me swimming at the next-door neighbor’s, a ludicrous Tucson March day, 91 degrees. “I’ve got to show you my new suit,” Leah said, a pink Spandex. She was bony. Diving in, she scrambled, dripping, onto the deck. “Look. It gets transparent,” she said, pirouetting. She was queerly naked, as if shrinking from her own skin.

  In San Francisco my wardrobe ran to puffed sleeves and balloon skirts, in which my head and body dwindled. I felt suspended like an airy, diaphanous insect. After presiding over a revolving door of roommates, I moved in with Roger. We’d begun with weekend drives through the redwoods, with his tape boxes, forty-eight in each. Roger likes everything, Beethoven, 101 Strings, metal, Admiral Bailey—some obscure reggae discovery. I’d cry. Roger’s copper hair refused to muss even with the windows down, wind eddies madly chasing our candy-bar wrappers.

  I still feel as if I’m living in the silence following a noise so loud that the quiet is shocking, not to be believed.

  Gradually I’ve allowed Roger to lavish indecent sums on me. Twice he’s flown us to Europe. To shed my accumulated blubber I’ve taken up jogging with him. It’s lovely, at daybreak, to pound the hills, the city below muffled in clouds.

  I like Roger. He’s taken the most marvelous tours, the Sahara, volcanoes in Indonesia, Alaskan glaciers. He won’t pick a favorite but says all are worthwhile.

  Leah was here last week, staying with her older daughter, who spent Christmas in Tucson. Homesick, the girl may transfer to the University of Arizona. “Her father is so virtuous, it gives her hives,” Leah said. The other two are still angry, she said, although at least they’re telling her so.

  When Leah called for directions, I braced myself with a hard run to the end of the pier. Damp from my shower, I tried different looks in the mirror, sand-cast silver necklace, T-shirt, jeans, flip-flops.

  The person swinging up the walk was dressed in a peach silk blouse, gray wraparound skirt furling about her legs.

  “Tummy in, ripcage oudt,” Leah barked in Madame Rifi’s suspect European accent. We clipped our posture, smiling. In my fantasized reunions she threw herself frantically into my arms, I gently whisking the hair from her face. The real Leah’s hug, firm and close, released smartly. “Man must moonlight as an oil sheik,” she said, glancing around the place. Roger was in L.A. for the weekend.

  I served us wine on the porch. We did a location chat, parking, the fog, the wind.

  “You could tell me why you didn’t call,” Leah said.

  “I’m sorry. I thought you might take the change-of-address card as an invitation.”

  “I couldn’t be first. I’ve been such a bloodsucking leech.”

  Ducking that, I asked, “Seeing anyone?”

  “Claire, I haven’t been with a soul since Eskison. I have to attribute that to you,” she said, “your cutting me off, sort of. That was tough medicine, and I don’t know if I forgive you for it, but it was good medicine.”

  “I’m sorry,” I repeated.

  “You had your reasons, honey, God knows.” She crossed to me and we embraced again, this time a sticky one.

  Through a bottle of Chardonnay, Leah told me that she swam, took the neighbor kids for chili dogs. The past election she’d volunteered for two local candidates. “One for two.” After test-marketing her quilted pillows, a mall boutique had picked up the line. “Whoopie shit,” she said, twirling her finger. “Whoopie cushions.”

  Arranged in the deck chair she was nearly composed, only her hands balling and releasing.

  “You’ve fleshed out,” I said. “Nicely, I mean.”

  “Now that I don’t want, natch, there’s the carpenter who sanded my floor, all my students are in love with me …”

  Captivated by her familiar lilt, I thought, hasn’t she become exactly who I want? Though I continued to talk—gesturing at a pelican flapping comically—I was flushed, with the cool hollowness that precedes tears. But I am so light now, this insubstantial hovering—love is as palpable as dirt filling your mouth, glass pricking your skin. I poured more wine, knowing the trembling would pass.

  But Leah! Head tilted, laughing, arm gracefully outstretched—how can a person cease being who she’s always been? Miracles, all kinds. Pathology arrests itself. A heart knotted with the effort of love slips into love like a bar of soap. A boy sits in a tree, heels kicking against the limb, and as you watch he falls to the ground. Friendships end.

  FROM THE PHILIPPINES

  Deirdre’s Philippine snapshots were late. Every day they failed to arrive, Deirdre’s friend Curtis told her, she grew dizzier. Her gray eyes glittered. Her freckled complexion flushed pink. The soft waves of her auburn hair burst into a fiercely becoming curly frame around her head. She talked incessantly, though not about the Philippines, since by now everybody but Curtis refused to hear about it. She had spent a semester and summer there, as an exchange student.

  When the final bell rang, Deirdre edged down the ramp, books clamped to her chest, in a surge of 2,500 other high school students. She felt assaulted by bulges—the boys’ prodding crotches, the girls’ nipples encircled by blonde flips and Izod alligators. Deirdre hated their touching her. Her first months home after the Philippines, she’d needed only to close her eyes to be shinnying up a date palm with Chacho or ladling Mama’s fish stew, her back to the warm oven. Now she felt in the midst of her recurrent dream: waking on a beach that came alive, a moving carpet of crabs, feathery and spiky, intimate with all of her. As the students squeezed down the ramp, a boy pushed himself against her buttocks. Deirdre swung her looseleaf binder back in a hard uppercut. She heard a grunt. When she knelt at her locker, a girl was saying above her, “Who would you kick out of bed, Erik Estrada or Sugar Ray Leonard?”

  “Good-bye Erik,” another answered. “Give me brown sugar every time. Who would you kick out of bed, Billy Zoom or Billy Idol?”

  “Whom,” Deirdre said. “Wignorant itches. Whom would you kick out of bed. Think of womb. That shouldn’t be any trouble for you.”

  Home, no mail. Her father squirmed in his armchair and sipped from a highball glass, watching TV. He’d sat there for eight years, since rheumatoid arthritis had forced his retirement from City Maintenance. The living room belonged to him. No one else was allowed to use it.

  Deirdre filled her silver pint flask from the half gallon of Seagram’s in the kitchen and drove into the hills.

  Thickets of mesquite gave way to saguaro forest as she hiked up the mountain. Below her, trails meandered through muted green desert in a scene as delicately complex as a Japanese watercolor. Soon Deirdre was in the Philippines. At first she couldn’t capture the matter-of-factness of true memory. The tropical vegetation was impossibly shaggy, the colors blaring purples and greens. Then she was swimming in slow motion, water flowing over her back. Crisp stems of water hyacinth parted beneath her fingers, the petals brushing her face. Her host Filipino family—Mama, Papa, Chacho, and the three sisters—flitted through the trees, their white underwear iridescent. Afterwards they lay on the bank, Chacho asleep, his head on Deirdre’s knee.

  Swallowing from her flask, Deirdre sat against the trunk of a palo verde and put her hands to her temples. By almost closing her eyes she could see Chacho as a mountain hovering in the distance, huge. His lowered lids were sloping faces of rock, his mouth a soft crease in the earth. Floating over the desert, the
Chacho-mountain swept back and forth, erasing the gray and glass bits of the city, the cars with hundreds of setting suns reflected off their roofs, the chatter of her high school halls.

  With delight, Deirdre recalled reading Kahlil Gibran aloud with Chacho: “When you part from your friend, you grieve not; for that which you love most in him may be clearer in his absence, as the mountain to the climber is clearer from the plain.”

  She walked back down the trail into the dusk, singing. After she could no longer see them, she could hear her feet on the stones. The long curve of lights marking the boundary of the city was the Manila shoreline. The far mountain range, absorbed into the dark, was the ocean. A few birds, she thought, would still be flying over the obsidian water.

  In the kitchen at home, her mother gave her carrots to wash and peel, broccoli to trim. Deirdre held the lumps of vegetable under the streaming tap. She felt dazed, and the light hurt her eyes. Her mother hurried from stove to refrigerator to counter to oven. From long practice, the two cooperated well and had little need to talk. Mrs. McGuire seldom spoke, as a matter of habit. Turning from the sink with her pots of vegetables, Deirdre bumped her mother, carrying meat loaf in a pan. The broccoli tipped onto the floor.

  “Sorry, Mom.”

  “We’ll wash it. We won’t tell anyone.”

  Deirdre giggled, but her mother already was past, opening the oven door.

  Deirdre set the table and, when dinner was ready, served her young sisters. They were beautiful and untrustworthy; Deirdre constantly covered for them. One stole money from her mother’s purse. The other would not do anything, not clean her room, help with the dishes. She cried when asked to put away her clothes.

  Deirdre brought her father a plateful of food. “They’re in it now,” he said, pointing to the TV. “No one’s going to get them out of this one.”

  His arm knocked the highball glass to the floor. “Get me another, sweetheart,” he said.

  “Ha, ha,” Deirdre said. Often, despite her sharing the Seagram’s, her urge was to spit in his liquor. Resisting, she would feel sick with herself for the thought. She returned to the dining room, sat down, and began to eat. But her father yelled until her mother made him a 7 and 7. Furious, Deirdre said nothing for the remainder of the meal.

  Curtis was late picking her up. Deirdre walked back and forth in her room, reading Gibran’s “On Friendship” from an imitation parchment scroll, a gift from Chacho. The JV game had gone into double overtime, Curtis explained when he arrived. He was the school paper’s assistant sports editor. Deirdre tucked the scroll in her back pocket, and they drove toward a boondocker in the desert, drinking rum.

  “I never told you the weirdest thing that happened to me with Gloria,” Curtis said. Deirdre and Curtis had carried on their six-week friendship by exchanging monologues, hers on the Philippines, his on Gloria. Curtis was driving fast up First Avenue, and badly, as usual. Twice he yanked the car back from the dirt shoulder. Sometimes he drove with his right hand on the wheel and his left waving out the window, sometimes with his left on the wheel and his right arm around Deirdre.

  A month ago, he told her, just before the breakup, he’d sneaked the car by pushing it out the driveway and down the block, then gone to Gloria’s. He woke her by tapping on the bedroom window.

  “She had on her nightgown, which was just a little lace here and here, and even in the dark I was just thiiis close to seeing her through it.” Curtis had admitted that he tried to look down Deirdre’s blouse and the back of her jeans whenever possible. “She put on her fur coat and came out the window.”

  On their way to the desert, she’d tickled his neck and stuck her tongue in his ear, Curtis said, but when they parked, it was the same as always: neck, arms, and legs below the knee, O.K. Shoulders and back outside her clothes, O.K. Period. “We’re kissing and I’m going crazy, and all of a sudden I realize I’m embracing, stroking, really digging my fingers into this thick fur. I feel like I’m making love to a big muskrat. I ask her, hey, whose perverso movie is this?”

  “I don’t know what’s wrong with Gloria. If I weren’t the Frigididity Queen, I’d be raping you every second,” Deirdre said kindly. Curtis might have been called peculiarly handsome, tall and slender, with pointy features, thick white-blond hair, and dark circles under his eyes.

  “Say ‘frigidity,’” Curtis said.

  “Frigididity.” It was Deirdre’s policy to fracture words suggesting sex.

  “Say’tits.’”

  “Bazoozums.”

  “Say ‘ass.’”

  “Hindnickels.”

  “Excellent. Say ‘vagina.’”

  “Virginia.”

  “That’s the girl. I was thinking, the reason they haven’t sent the pictures is probably because it’s harvest time or something.”

  “That was November,” Deirdre said. “It’s almost Christmas.” She didn’t want to talk about the mail. After three letters a week from Chacho, now no letters in five weeks.

  From the top of the rise in the dirt road they saw the party, two bonfires in a dry swimming pool, part of an abandoned, reputed Mafia resort of the ‘50’s. A couple of dozen natty teenagers danced to a boom box between the fires.

  Deirdre soon was drunk again, with the accompanying tension that left her face lopsided and pugnacious. She was concentrating on Chacho’s theory of sex: with abstinence, the sexual fluids would rise up the spine into the head, creating a dynamo of spiritual energy. “The face glows,” he’d said, “like yours.” While the tape was being changed, she climbed onto the diving board. Shadows of flames played over the pool like a negative of sunlight on water. The board felt very high, and slender like a bending reed.

  “What do any of you know about friendship?” she said. “The Filipinos understand friendship. Your kasama is your friend for life! Pingsarili—you would translate that as ‘privacy.’ That’s what I used to think. But Pilipino has no word for privacy. Pingsarili is like loneliness. Imagine a people whose word for privacy means loneliness. Friendship!”

  “Oh, Christ, Deirdre,” someone said. A bottle broke against a far wall.

  From her back pocket, Deirdre pulled the scroll of Gibran’s “On Friendship.” After reading, she replaced the parchment in her pocket and recited the whole from memory.

  The others began singing loudly.

  “Friendship is staying up all night on the beach, just talking,” Deirdre shouted. “Friendship is giving everything, your secrets, your voice, your language, and getting everything in return. Friendship is touching for love, not tutti-frutti. ‘Let there be no purpose in friendship save the deepening of the spirit.’”

  The diving board sagged and bounced. Below Deirdre, her companions’ faces looked as remote and featureless as pebbles. “Come sit with me,” Curtis was saying, and, his arm around her shoulders, he led her to the pool steps.

  How many acres did the family farm? he asked. What was the growing season? What were the major crops of the Philippines? His pointed nose and sharp chin darted toward her with intense earnestness. Deirdre wasn’t fooled. She knew he quizzed her to disguise his boredom with the Philippines. She didn’t care. Boring everybody gave her a sense of accomplishment and pride. Curtis at least tried to be interested.

  Deirdre explained the planting of rice. She remembered ambling home astride the carabao, led by Chacho, how she could lean forward and grip the animal’s sweeping horns, like tremendous handlebars, and rub the forehead, broad as a slab of moss-covered mahogany. Chacho’s brown feet squashed into the mud, guiding her through green rice plants and rich brown earth, paddies that seemed endless.

  “Do the women ever work in the fields topless?” Curtis asked.

  “The old grannies, maybe, in the hills.”

  “Did you ever work topless?” His forehead contracted into cobwebbed lines, his eyes squinted eagerly.

  “Mother of God,” she said.

  “My dick hangs down the left leg of my pants, and I notice that everyone else�
�s is on the right,” Curtis blurted. He rolled and lit a joint, but something was wrong and one side of the paper flared up like a jet of natural gas. “My guess is that it won’t function properly. Go in crooked. Gloria knows her sex, she would have caught that right off. There’s the problem.”

  After they’d gone together six months, Gloria had told Curtis she’d slept with a quarterhorse trainer she picked up at the track. The man, a Canadian, moved on with the racing circuit, but Gloria said since she was in love with him there was no point in seeing anyone else.

  “Unzip,” Deirdre said. “Show me.”

  “What?”

  “Come on.”

  Curtis turned his back to the bonfire, hunched forward, lowered his fly, and cupped his hand around, without touching, his exposed penis.

  “It’s fine,” Deirdre said. “No problem.”

  “But how would you know?”

  “My father leaves his lying around carelessly sometimes. Yours is much more appealing, believe me.”

  Curtis finished his smoke. “This makes me nervous,” he said. “I’m going to move around.” He hopped the pool steps two at a time and began loping along the rim of the pool, circling it twice with high, floating bounds. His white hair stood on end, settled, rose, fell. The black circles made his eyes look enormous in his white face.

  On Deirdre’s front porch, Curtis suddenly kissed her on the lips. Startled, she allowed his tongue in her mouth. Her mouth gaped open, slack, until he put his hand on the seat of her jeans. She stiffened. Her saliva took on a metallic tinge. She thought of his hands in fur, a dead animal, his fingers breaking through desiccated skin and tufts of hair. A line of teenagers embraced, the girls in their pleated skirts crumbling, clothes collapsing to the concrete floor of the swimming pool. “Good night,” Deirdre said. Pushing off Curtis’s chest, she backed through the door.

  Her father sat in the dark facing the gray slush of the TV screen. The pale light traveled up his legs, to his open fly and his penis, which pointed straight at his head. True as a compass needle, Deirdre thought. She hurried by.