But she keeps on. Louder, uglier. Challenging me, in front of the guys, who are starting to look at me to see if I’ve had enough. There’s a thick rope of lust in the air. They want to see us go at it. My chest starts to burn with pressure, but I stay with my business. Sit-ups, push-ups. Not gonna get into some idiot catfight.
This goes on for half an hour, and the air’s thicker and thicker. Tense and tight. Oppressive. The anger at Dante and the bullshit here are mixing up in my body, and I’m aching to hurt somebody. Teach this little bitch a lesson.
To one side is Tony’s brother, Gabe. I look at him and he comes over, turning his back to the rest of them so they won’t see what he says to me. “You gotta stand up to her, Jade. You’re losing all respect here.”
“Rueben will kill me.”
“He’ll get over it. I’ll tell him how it was.” He narrows his eyes. “You scared?”
I meet his eyes. “No.”
“Get in the ring with her. Spar. I’ll be in your corner.”
And it’s what I want anyway, to channel this fury out of me. I step around him. “All right, bitch. Get in the ring.”
A little ripple of approval goes through the boxers.
Gabe helps me tie on my gloves. I eye my opponent. She’s squat and carries about ten extra pounds through the middle, but I’m not kidding myself. She’s got that Southwest Indian body, powerful through the torso, and if she hits me, I’ll know it. But my reach is much longer than hers. I’m faster. She’s younger. I’m smarter.
Gabe murmurs warnings. “Watch her uppercut. It’s dangerous and could break your jaw. Watch the body blows.” He gives me the tooth protector. “Don’t hold back, or she’ll hurt you.”
Adrenaline and anticipation are rushing through me. Rueben is going to kill me, but Gabe’s right. No way around this if I want any respect in here.
“Pretty girl,” she says, and smiles. If the Apache took prisoners, she’d have been the one to think up the ant punishment. It gives me a healthy measure of fear.
We circle and feint, measuring each other. I’m pumped and moving too much and will wear myself out. I slow down, looking for an opening. See how she plants each foot, every time, square and solid.
I can’t stand the tension, and throw the first punch, a right that she ducks. But she’s quicker than I thought, lands a grazing blow over my shoulder. I hear the murmurs, the catcalls, the conversation as we circle and feint some more.
She lands a right cross to my cheekbone.
Jesus.
For the space of two long seconds I can’t see anything, can’t hear anything. She hits me again, eye and jaw.
Bam. It feels like my face is going to break in two. Instinct kicks in and I deflect a third blow, hear a little roar from the boxers, grab her. She laughs.
And that’s it. There’s no anger in me. A cold power surges through my body, into my limbs, and I fling her away. There’s nothing now but me and her. No Dante. No death. No sorrow. Just this. The cold strength in my arms. The sharpness of my attention. The fierce, icy focus that makes me see she has a hitch in her gait, every time. I wait for it. Deflect a cross, then an uppercut that would have knocked me down. It just kisses the edge of my jaw.
She wants my eye again. It’s closing. It’s impossible that we haven’t reached the end of one round yet. In a split second, I see my opening. Plant my feet, swing from the left into her hitched gait.
It lands at the joint of her jaw. It’s solid, with my weight behind it. The shock rockets up my arm, and she doesn’t so much as stumble backward, but sails up and lands flat on her back.
My heart is pumping and there’s dizziness in my head and now my eye is starting to really swell, but I wait for Miss Thing to get up.
She just lies there.
A couple of the guys are in the ring now, yelling at her. I’m blinking and panting. Waiting. And it starts to scare me when she doesn’t get up after the count, that she hasn’t moved.
God, what if I killed her? I send a terrified gaze to Gabe. He shakes his head, lifts his chin toward her. I turn back, and she’s spitting and fighting, shouting curses, but they won’t let her fight any more today. It takes two of them to drag her out of the ring.
“Fuck you, bitch! That was a lucky punch.”
I smile. “Yeah, right.”
It’s only then that I see Rueben, standing to one side with his big arms crossed. His face has no expression. He stares at me hard for a long minute, then points—first to me, then with a thumb over his shoulder toward the office. He heads down the hall without waiting to see if I’ll do it.
“Shit,” I say to Gabe. “Help me off with the gloves, then you gotta tell him what was goin’ on.”
“It’ll be all right. You did good, babe.”
“Don’t call me babe,” I snap.
He chuckles. “Damn, girl, you hit like a man.”
I pull out of the gloves. “Go. Tell him.”
With a wink, he crawls between the ropes and I stand there for a minute, giving him some time to get ahead of me. I catch the eye of one older Spanish guy. He lifts his chin in respect. Not like a man looking at a hot woman. Like a man to a man.
It feels good.
As I make my way to the office, I can tell I’m going to have a massive headache by nightfall. I’m a little queasy, whether from the rush of chemicals in my system or the blow itself, I don’t know. Or maybe I’m just afraid of what Rueben is going to say.
He’s standing in the office, a whistle around his neck like a gym teacher. “Thanks, Gabe,” he says as I come in. “This is between Jade and me.”
Gabe gives me a shrug as he scurries out.
“Shut the door,” Rueben says. “Sit down.”
I do. He hands me an ice bag and I put it on my face.
He sits in the off-kilter office chair. Folds his hands in his lap. Looks at me. “Hurt enough to suit you?”
I peer at him through my good eye. Raise my eyebrows.
“What were you thinkin’, Jade? Got a death wish?”
“No! You heard Gabe. I had to fight her.”
“You’re not ready.” His voice is low and furious.
“Fuck that! I knocked her out!” I lower the bag and glare at him. “You’re babying me.”
“You got lucky. I’m not saying you can’t do it, eventually. I’m saying that you getting in the ring with her was like a pup thinking she can take on a seven-year-old pit bull.”
Sullenly, I slump. My feelings are hurt. I wanted him to tell me how well I’d done. Tell me I can get in the ring.
All at once, he lets go of a breath and leans forward to put his head in his hands. “Damn, woman, when I came in there and saw you in the ring, it took ten years off my life.”
“Rueben—”
“Stop.” He lifts his head and stares at me. “You don’t know what you’re talking about. If you want me to coach you, you’ve gotta follow my rules, you got it? You don’t get in that ring unless I set up the fight and tell you you can. Got it?”
I swallow. Nod.
“Let’s go take a look at your eye.” He stands up and leads me through a narrow hallway to a staff bathroom where the first-aid supplies are kept. It’s dark and gloomy in there. He flips on the light, a harsh fluorescent.
It’s the first chance I’ve had to see the wound and look in the mirror. “Oh, wow.” My eye is dark reddish purple across the eyelid and all the way up to the eyebrow. A glove-sized red mark surrounds that. By morning, it’s gonna be something to see.
“Turn around,” Rueben says.
I put my butt on the sink and lift my face toward him. With gentle fingers, he probes the edges, lifts the eyelid to look at my eye. “Close your right eye,” he says. “Now what can you see?”
“It’s kind of blurry.”
“Any red tint?”
“No.” I’m looking at his face with my wounded eye, feeling the size and tenderness of him. I look at his mouth and wish that he seemed to feel the slightest a
ttraction to me. Instead it’s all business, all the time, with Rueben Perry.
I bow my head. “I’ll be all right.”
His other hand falls on my neck, then my shoulder. “You’re tense as hell.”
“It was a bad day.”
“Yeah? Want to talk about it?” His strong fingers knead the place between my shoulder and neck, and it makes me irritable. I shrug it off.
“No.”
But all of a sudden, it’s agonizing, the recognition of how I let myself be used, how foolish I was, how much I loved Dante in spite of all the things I must have known about him. I put my hand over my eye and grit my teeth to keep from crying.
“Come here, Jade,” he says in his low, kind voice. I fall forward into the safety of his big arms, putting my face against his chest. He holds me tight. Not one of those wimpy brother-sister hugs. It’s real. Solid. I can smell the laundry soap he uses in his shirt. His belt buckle is cold against my belly and his thighs are hard. And I grip him back, feeling a shaky tremble moving through my arms. His hand is gentle on my hair. “You’re a strong woman, inside and out. Don’t let anybody take you down.”
I raise my head. “Thank you.”
And for one long second, I think he’s going to kiss me. We haven’t let go, and I’m looking up at just the right angle. He’s looking at me for the first time like he’d like it, like he’s hungry, too.
Then he swallows and puts me away from him. “It would be a mistake, Jade,” he says quietly.
“Why?”
He steps back, turns half away. “Just would.”
But that means it wasn’t my imagination. I put my hand on his shoulder. “Rueben?”
He doesn’t look at me. “Go home, Jade. Rest up. We’ll talk tomorrow.”
I take my hand back. Nod. Feel a sting of rejection that is really not what I needed today. It makes me feel stupid and—
“Jade.”
I stop and look at him. “Don’t worry about it,” I say with a bitter smile. “I’ll be all right. I’m a strong woman, remember?”
The still waters of the air
Under the bough of the echo
The still waters of the water
under a frond of stars
The still waters of your mouth
under a thicket of kisses
“Variations”
FEDERICO GARCÍA LORCA,
Translated by LYSANDER KEMP
29
TRUDY
The afternoon of the first real snow, I go downstairs to my massage room for the first time in five months. It’s cold in here, and I know it needs to be dusted, but the smell of aromatherapy oils envelopes me immediately, and I pause, closing my eyes at the sudden wave of images that flood through me.
Driving up to Boulder the first weekend of my classes, feeling so sick with nerves that I nearly turned around twice … coming home, each time, from the earthy people I’d spent my hours with, to the squareness of the house, Rick pretending to take an interest, but listening for only five minutes before he launched into long explanations of his weekends.
Lies, as it turned out. A familiar brittleness invades me.
I push it away, push into the room as if there is a force holding me back. Deliberately, I stride to the CD player and click it on. Enya glides into the room on a liquid harp, a CD I haven’t heard in too long. The sound unknots the tension in my neck, and I’m able to strip the linens from the table, throw them on the floor. My wrist twinges the slightest bit, but I ignore it, open the closet to get some cleaning supplies down.
Methodically, I oil away the dust in the room, off the surfaces of the unnamed goddess statue in one corner, off the small tables and the window ledges and the rainbow array of glass bottles catching the light. There is a yawning sense of pain through it, and my head is blistered with visual and auditory memories—“Marino, huh?” said my client, a new one with long dark hair and red acrylic nails. “A friend of mine has a boyfriend named Marino. Rick? Is he your brother or something?”
I squeeze my eyes closed, wipe down the table itself, remember that resistance is the sure way to see something echo through you forever, but dwelling is equally damaging. So I let it all flow, through me and out of me into the scrubbing this room has needed and is only getting because someone needs me more than I need to resist it.
Jade needs me.
So I get the mop and bucket and let the disaster of that hot July day come through me. Hearing the words, and feeling again the disbelief. Holding my cool until I finish the massage, mind racing with possibilities, then going straight to the phone to cancel my other appointments for the day. Disbelief mixing with knowledge, with dreams of warning, with strange little things that had been bothering me, with shaking recognition as I used Windows Explorer to search the computer for the woman’s name: Carolyn Sears. And read the files that came up, dozens of them, chronicling the entire absurdity of an extramarital affair.
I remake the table, and begin wiping down the small bottles of essential oils, one at a time. I’d driven to the Harley shop, and before he even knew I was there, had shattered most of the windows in his truck with the only thing I could find, a tire jack from my own trunk. The sound of the first windows breaking brought a spectator, and his shout brought more, and I ignored them all, swinging the jack with all my might, crash crash crash, methodically. The windshield was on the seat inside the truck, and both door windows were cracked very nicely, but even when I climbed up in the bed and swung hard, the back glass resisted. I gave up and jumped out, aware that my wrist was tired and sore, but not done yet, so I swung it at the body, putting dents in the shiny red doors by the time Rick grabbed the jack out of my hand, and he was bewildered, yelling, “What the hell are you doing, Trudy?”
“Fuck you, Rick, and fuck your girlfriend, Carolyn.” I rushed to the car, avoiding him, because he was trying to talk, to get a word in edgewise, to convince me of something, and I reached in, took the e-mails I’d printed, and threw them in the air.
I got in the car and drove away. Shock or rage protected me long enough that I got to Roberta’s house, where I broke down and sobbed hysterically for two hours. My wrist was aching and red, but I didn’t really feel the extreme pain until I was getting ready for bed. Without Rick.
I shake it a little now, easing the tenseness. Massage will be good for it.
The mystery is when, exactly, I broke it. I remember, vaguely, hitting the brace of the windshield at one point, but I barely felt it. It wasn’t a hairline fracture, either. A clean, visible break on the X ray, with a broken edge where a piece of bone had been knocked free by the force. Three months in that blasted cast.
Jade shows up at seven, sans makeup, and looks even worse than her voice sounded on the phone. To my amazement, when I touch her shoulder, she starts to cry. “It’s not helping to say fuck you,” she says, collapsing on the couch, her knees akimbo as they’d been when she was younger.
“Sometimes it doesn’t. C’mon, honey. Let me show you where I do this.”
She doesn’t move right away. “Is it going to be weird, giving a massage to someone you know?”
“Not for me. Are you uncomfortable?”
“I don’t know. I’ve never done this before.”
“Never?”
“Well, not outside sexual situations.”
I smile. “Remember how it felt when your mother brushed your hair? This is more like that.”
She gets up and follows me downstairs, through the family room, into a back bedroom, the room that used to be Richard and Colin’s. I have already warmed it up, turned on the lights. I’ve chosen some Nakai for the music, because it’s melancholy and beautiful, and I suspect Jade needs a good cry. “Just get undressed, and get up on the table and cover yourself with that blanket.”
“All the way?”
“You can leave on your underwear if you feel more comfortable, but everything else needs to go.”
She shifts, tosses her hair. “What do most people
do?”
“Take everything off.” I find myself using my healer’s voice, the soft low one, nonthreatening. “It just makes it easier for the therapist to do the work. But do whatever makes you comfortable.”
She nods.
“I’ll be back in a few minutes.”
And this is my ritual for a new client. I go upstairs, into the greenhouse, to the altar of the goddess I have set up. Tonight it is Yemaya, the African goddess of the rivers and oceans, and a great mother. I’m pleased that it worked out this way—Yemaya can help with the flow of a woman’s tears. I light the fat round blue candle in front of her. Her incense is a powdery blue, and I put some in the abalone shell and light it. There is a bottle of an aromatherapy oil called “rain” and I open it, touch small drops to my temples and forehead and throat, opening to whatever Yemaya can give me for Jade. Then I hold in my hand the egg-shaped labradorite I found in Manitou Springs for this altar. It’s cold when I pick it up, but warms quickly in my hands, and I close my eyes and take a long, slow, deep breath, blowing out my own negativity, allowing all the healing spirits to come into me.
It’s the first time I have done this ritual since that awful day, and as the feeling of peace rushes through me, the sense of heat comes into my hands, I am almost overcome with gratitude that I have a chance to do this for my friend, that I have been trained in ways that will help heal her sorrowing heart tonight, that I can do something so useful. Leaving the candle burning, I return to the kitchen, thoroughly wash and dry my hands, and go back downstairs, knocking lightly on the door. Jade says, “I’m ready.”
First-time clients are often a little nervous, and they try to talk. Usually, I dissuade them gently by giving short, quiet answers to encourage them to drift away into the healing world of music and touch and scent, but as I position myself at Jade’s head, pulling her hair gently away from her shoulders and neck, I simply tell her, “You can give me direction, but just let go of talking other than that, okay?”
The Goddesses of Kitchen Avenue: A Novel Page 19