by Manuel Munoz
THE WOMAN NEXT DOOR is named Ana Martínez and her triplet sons are Carlos, Cristian, and Claudio. The father fled long ago to Mexico, leaving Ana to care for the triplets from very early on; his name is Ignacio Martínez, and Ana has kept his name and has passed it on to her three sons. The house she has raised them in is in her name and her name only. She has paid for it with hard seasonal jobs in Parlier, Sanger, and Orange Cove and even as far west as Lemoore. Ana has worked in a poultry factory (where she accidentally chopped off her left thumb tip); in a fabric assembly line, tending denim; in the hot, open-air canneries sorting summer fruit; in the fields, picking tomatoes on the east end of the Valley, sorting them into the light green plastic baskets only as big as her hand. She has all the old standbys of such jobs tucked away in her bedroom closet, just in case a similar job ever comes around. Up there are the heavy work gloves, the cannery aprons with their periwinkle designs, the yellow plastic hairnets, the knives with the curved hooks for cutting grapes. Ana has successfully cheated welfare for years, lying about some of her income so she can keep feeding the boys, her troubles always three times as weighty as anyone else’s. It has been surprisingly easy to get around the system, even with her jumping from seasonal job to seasonal job and her shoddy English. At the high school, the town offered free English classes in the summertime, and Ana had tried attending but quit almost immediately. The class was taught by an older white woman who had promptly sent her students to the community college in Reedley to buy books for the class. When Ana saw the forty-dollar price sticker on the cover, she had stood in the aisle of the community college bookstore weighing such a cost and had determined that it was too much money for a class that was allegedly free.
As her boys grew older, Ana sent them out to earn their keep, and she has thus raised her sons to know the value of money and of helping each other out. Sometimes she is bewildered by their lack of good sense. Had they not witnessed how hard she had worked for them? Why was generosity with money the only lesson they had learned? There are only two of them now: one died when he was seventeen. Carlos had been driving a motorcycle with a neighborhood boy, broadsided at a rural intersection. Both boys had been killed: hers instantly, the other at his own home days later. Of the two sons that are left, Ana sometimes feels she has only one: Cristian is serving time in a correctional facility down south in Avenal for holding up a gas station. Thankfully, he did not kill anyone.
So it is: once Claudio married and had children, he and his new wife convinced Ana to rent out the little house. She lives now in her own one-room apartment on the good side of town. Monthly she travels to Gold Street and collects the rent from the Mexican couple who live in her house. They are good people and keep the place clean; they’ve planted a row of tall rosebushes in her front yard to please her, and what used to be a hard dirt yard is now so green and plush she wants to walk barefoot on it. The old neighborhood has changed. Sidewalks. Street drainage. Curbs. The houses are now owned by people she remembers as children, and they all have jobs and brand-new cars.
There is that boy, too, from next door when her sons were little: he is a man now and full grown, but the little brother she does not see as much. That house has been transformed, too — a fresh coat of paint every few years, grass and shrubbery, a thin driveway of rocks and gravel. Ana knows it is the older son who takes care of things now. For some time, she thought that the mother had died, only because she had not seen her for so long. For months, Ana had carried inside a tremendous sorrow for not having properly thanked that woman or begged her forgiveness for that incident so many years ago. She was too ashamed to appear nosy to ask the couple who rented her house about the woman next door. Then one day, Ana saw her being helped into her son’s car. The woman had aged tremendously, and she appeared to have trouble walking. Ana had waved to her, but the woman was bent in concentration, easing herself into the car. She had not noticed Ana, and so Ana got in her own car and drove back to her side of town. She is so ashamed to admit that she does not know that woman’s name.
SEBASTIÁN STILL LIVES WITH his mother. He runs many of the errands for the house, does much of the cooking and cleaning, and sits down every month to sort out his mother’s bills. His mother broke her hip in a car accident several years ago, and though she healed, he thinks the accident destroyed the resolve and rigid demeanor that he used to know. She seems to have tired of doing so much and now relies on him to drive her to the store or to the shopping centers in Visalia.
Sebastián feels suckered into the position: his little brother moved out of the house right after high school, down to the South Valley, around Avenal. Stevie is training to be a guard at a correctional facility; he claims to work the night shift, which makes it impossible to come visit their mother because he sleeps all day. Sebastián does not know if Stevie is telling the truth, but he envies his way of avoiding any familial responsibility. Of his own life, Sebastián and his mother have an unspoken understanding. Taking care of her, watching their money, there is no way he will be allowed a life of his own. Sebastián has never been in love. He accepts his position in this world much too easily, as if someday (but not now) he will return the glances he receives from the beautiful man in the red Datsun pickup on Tuesdays at the grocery store. Someday his life will begin.
Sebastián, over the years, has watched the goings-on with the new next-door neighbors. He has watched as they transformed the old, weary house into a respectable piece of property, one that could bring a good sum of money, even for this neighborhood. Slowly, Sebastián began working in their own yard to avoid being inside with his mother and the telenovelas. He broke through the dirt yard and brought in new topsoil, layering it with grass and flower beds. The old appliances and the junked Chevrolets that had plagued the backyard were hauled away. There were long weekends of scraping the old paint from the house before he went down to the hardware store and chose a color, not asking his mother for an opinion. He wishes these transformations to their property could change his mother back to what she had been: Here’s self-reliance, he wants to tell her, here’s self-sufficiency. Look at their old neighbor in her new car. Listen to the rumors about where she lives now. It is not true that her son is in jail for drug running. That is not where her money comes from. It is not true that the insurance money from one of her dead triplets made the new car possible. Look at her, Sebastián wants to say. You can change.
Sebastián stands in the backyard, losing himself nightly. This is where it happened. How did something that happened without a word — not one word — transform itself into the fight between their mothers? Who saw them in the backyard of his house, where the debris of Sebastián’s father’s relentless scouring of yard sales and car auctions left only a legacy of junk? Who looked out a window to see Sebastián there behind a defunct Chevy, kneeling, openmouthed like the hood of that car? Why was it that Sebastián could not recall how many times it had happened, him and one of the triplets, how they had transformed their games into a kind of play he did not fully understand? Why had he trusted that brother, allowed him to put him inside the discarded refrigerator and close the door? Memory cannot restore the answers for him, but the sudden heat and the lack of air, the faint odor of decaying vegetables, always comes back to Sebastián without effort. And yet still he allowed it, over and over, the sealing of the door against the daylight while that brother grinned at him. Because very soon the door would open, and his rescuer would come in a mad rush, pulling him from the confines of this horrible trap and leading him into one of the getaway cars, the one with the hood down so they could see their imaginary road. How had dust entered that car, coated the seats and the steering wheel and the radio knobs, when the windows were always sealed up? Hide, he remembers the triplet saying, they’re shooting, and he would push Sebastián low on the wide bench seat, and this is how it always began. They were too old to be playing like this. They were in junior high.
Look at the backyard now: the lawn chairs and the glass-topped table with a s
triped umbrella in the middle. Sebastián sits out there in the early evenings, looking west, sipping iced tea and pretending to read the town newspaper. He built that fence from pinewood, leveled it and set the beams in concrete. It will never sag the way the old fences always did. It will never rot in the rain like the one his father built before he went away. The grass back here is the same as the lush green out front. No more tall weeds browning in the summer sun, no more errant trash pushed into the corner of the yard by the wind. A row of sunflowers, small offerings of tomatoes, earth turned over so often it is as dark as his hands. No traces of what the place used to look like, all the old junk hauled away, not a drop of oil, not a speck of rust.
Sometimes, when he is sure his mother is engrossed in the telenovela, and the evening has come full on, Sebastián gets up from the lawn chair and walks barefoot across the grass. He waters the lawn and the flowers in trickles and pretends to fool with the hose. But he is a lonely young man, and this is why he moves from spot to spot on the lawn, as if looking at the horizon and the sky. He asks himself if he is standing where the old refrigerator used to be, if he is standing on the spot where he once knelt, where he floated below one of the triplets.
Was it the dust and dirt on his clothes that gave it all away? Had someone peeked over to see what they were up to? Why hadn’t he driven the car for once, pushed the triplet down to get away from the pursuers, felt the rush of that kind of escape? Which triplet was it — the one in jail, the dead one, or the one who is married? Could it have been more than one? Does cruelty carry over like that, down and through the blood?
It gets darker and darker as evening turns to night. His mother always comes to the back door and reminds him to turn in, and Sebastián always tells her, “Ya voy.” He stays there, though, and stops and wonders. He can feel his mother still at the back door, silent. Was this it? Right here? Here?
SEBASTIÁN’S MOTHER WAS BORN Adelina Valdes, and she married Ezequiel Jiménez when she was still very young, and they bought the house she lives in now before the first of her two children had even been born. Next door, Adelina had watched another young couple just like them move in, and one summer she noticed that the woman was becoming larger and larger — she was pregnant, and Adelina envied how their life was going to start. The husband was a handsome man who drove his own work truck. When Adelina sat on the front steps to enjoy the cool of evening, she could hear the husband bang the dust from his boots on his own concrete steps. How polite he was — how well he treated that woman.
Adelina never considered her family poor, even though they struggled. There was always enough to eat — maybe not a full meal, and maybe not extravagantly — but once she was married, she and Ezequiel never went to bed hungry. When she was growing up, her parents had always taught her to accept what she had, to work hard for her own, and never to complain that others had more. Yet there she was, watching that woman becoming larger and larger, and Adelina wanted nothing more than her life: a husband both handsome and thoughtful, a work truck, the thud of boots to knock out field dust and keep her house clean. When the babies arrived early the next spring, the neighbors all came to help her because one woman could not do it alone. They brought the woman food and diapers and toys, whatever they could. Adelina could hear their apologies from her front steps, the neighbors coming during the dinner hour to bring over a dish of food or a small bag of groceries.
Adelina wanted as much grace from the neighbors. She could not bring herself to walk next door and offer her congratulations and her aid. A month later, when it was warm enough to sit outside again during the evenings, Adelina saw the woman emerge from the house with one of the babies. Then the handsome father came out holding two more, and Adelina marveled at the excess — so it had been true. She had watched them load the babies into the truck, the woman getting in first and the husband trying his best to help his wife adjust to holding two in her lap. The third he carried himself, and then he shut the door. Adelina had watched them the whole time, and they had looked over at her, but she had pretended not to notice. She had turned to go back into the house, moving nonchalantly, but she had known those people were better than her in some way. They could have called out to her to get her attention, to say a neighborly hello, but they probably had been raised as she had — never bring attention, never brag.
With Ezequiel, she tried and tried to get pregnant, and when she finally did, Adelina was filled with a dread of expectation. It would not be enough, just one child, and she knew that. All through her pregnancy, she fretted over it, cried during the afternoons when Ezequiel was off working or looking for work. And when the baby arrived, it was Ezequiel who named him. Ezequiel was the one who was proud and excited about the arrival, gave him the name of a cherished uncle from Zacatecas. Adelina had agreed, holding the baby in her arms, knowing it was not enough.
When she came back from her short stay at the hospital, there were no neighbors to greet her. When she wheeled the baby to the town center to buy milk or diapers — an unnecessary trip because she had plenty in the house — none of the neighbors did more than say hello, stopping only briefly to peer at her baby. There was no help coming in the evenings, no bags of groceries. It was not enough, this child.
Adelina had not been raised that way. You love what you have and you do not envy. You love what you are given, and patience brings you more of what you love. She had not been raised to look at another man that way, to memorize him the way she had. She had not been raised to hold her first child in her arms, alone in the daytime while Ezequiel was off working or looking for work, and think such things. Adelina would hold the baby and stare into its eyes and try to love it, but the love would not come.
That guilt is with her again and not forgotten: lately, Adelina has said nothing of the pain, a thick wire of it in her hip that cannot be the old injury from the car accident. Not that pain, the jolt that still comes back to her only as a stiffness that keeps her seated on the living room sofa much longer than she really wants to be. That remnant of pain Adelina can live with. When it keeps her on the living room sofa, there is no way for Sebastián to know that she is in need. Adelina can keep quiet about it. It would do her good, she knows, if she gave voice to her distress, but she already knows that it is too late for that: she has fallen into her son’s assumptions that she has reached old age, even though she is still young.
But this new pain: it starts in the same spot, in the damage of the hip, and lodges itself as hot fire in her side. This new pain comes at night, travels farther up her torso every time. As she lies in bed, she can sense the pain pulsing, and in the dark Adelina probes her torso as if she might feel something there. Her body is at work: her blood races, and when the pain grips at her with its particularly fiery hand, Adelina’s mouth winces a heavy salt. That taste gathers itself and she rises from her bed at whatever hour to go to the bathroom and spit it out. Adelina has spooned the last remnants of jalapeño slices into a plastic bowl and rinsed out the jar. She keeps this jar under her bed, hidden away from view, and spits into it every night. In the morning, she inspects it, but there is nothing there to signify that fire.
After the car accident, during the recovery, her body seemed to expel everything. Blood came frequently: she would cough it up violently, wrenching her throat, or find it dotting her underwear. Her nose would bleed for no reason as she sat watching television, that heavy metallic taste in the back of her throat that signaled it, and by the time Adelina reached up to feel her nose, there were already drops coming down, spotting the front of her dress.
But this new pain — it brings her nothing. Adelina imagines herself at the doctor’s office, and she would not be able to describe what she is feeling without resorting to Spanish. It would make no sense in English. Como si alguien está adentro . . . no sé . . . así, adentro. Adelina would want to say that there is another presence inside of her because it only happens at night, and she racks herself trying to figure out who or what would have brought this on so late
in life. Adelina has paid all the prices; Adelina has withstood all the fists of daily living. Her husband left her long ago, and today she can still crumble at the finality and certainty of his departure — isn’t that punishment enough, the memory that refuses to let her go? She had a car accident, her cautious driving having done her no good as she entered one of the intersections way outside of town. The diesel truck had nailed the passenger side, and the wreckage had torn into her right hip. She’d been so lucky! That she was coming and not going; that the diesel truck was trying to slow down; that she had not been exposed to the open air like the neighbor’s son. That poor, poor child. Adelina had known his pain at that moment, had remembered him while she waited for the rescuers to extract her from the tangle of metal and the shards of glass. She had been weeping, not because of the pain, but because of the anticipation and imagination of something worse: her legs could have been hit, dead-on and naked, like that boy. She could have come to know the smell of the hot asphalt, the glass ground into her hands, something more besides the sinister hissing coming from her wrecked car. But instead, except for her hip, she had been miraculously unharmed.
Adelina rises from bed nightly now, restless in that way she remembers her own parents being, hearing them stumble through the small house, tiptoeing across the children strewn asleep on the living room floor. She goes to the bathroom but then finds herself standing at the back door. Did her parents do this, staring out into the backyard at three or four in the morning, fear amplified by the dead quiet of the neighborhood? What was scaring them, keeping them awake?
Sometimes she actually steps out into the backyard, reminding herself that it is a small town and there is nothing to fear at night. The frogs have come out, thanks to Sebastián’s persistent watering, and she can hear them plop softly away in fear of her footsteps. Sometimes the rumble of a work truck faintly echoes from several streets away; it is always a heavier sound, the sound of men gathering sleepy in a truckbed to hit the fields on the west side before dawn. Adelina stands barefoot in the grass. She has never had such simple luxuries: if she wants, she can put on shoes; if she wants, she can sit at the glass patio table her son has purchased. So why is this happening? Who is evil-eyeing this pain into her side when she has done so much to reverse her early faults? Are others free of this distress, or are they better at ignoring it — like her son Stevie in Avenal and his contentedness, or her former husband, Ezequiel, who must live with the self-satisfaction of a man who has fled from what he does not want? Even that woman from next door, her neighbor, despite having lost two sons, still has one to her name, and he is repaying her for everything she has given in her hard life. Adelina knows she has had a hard life. Adelina gave to her, too: she remembers their fight in the yard, the wincing and the pulling, the rings on each of their fists having no purpose anymore but to inflict damage. She saved her children, Adelina thinks, and has yet to receive thanks for it.