“Good choice,” he said. “By the way. I’m looking at your pictures right now. You’re Spanish or something, right? You could be a model. Something in those eyes.”
* * *
—
Most days that summer I woke up to the sounds of my mother. She was an academic counselor at a community college and left early, sometimes at dawn. I’d hear her in the bathroom flushing the toilet, clearing her throat into the sink, and singing Spanish songs in the shower. After I was alone, I’d walk the building, reacquainting myself with the boiler room, the basement’s stone slits for windows, and the locked storage units that resembled oversize ovens. The only magnificent area was the roof. A broken emergency exit opened to a view in every direction. To the west was the jagged crust of the mountains, to the east the park, and to the south were other apartments, all their lights a Milky Way for the city.
One cool evening, I was on the roof smoking a cigarette when I caught sight of a woman near the north ledge. She stood with her back to me, a snakelike gathering of brown hair to her hips. Silver bracelets like coils choked her wrists, and a sheer blouse, wavering with the wind, clung to her skin. I coughed and she turned around.
“Shit,” she said. “I didn’t think anyone else came up here.”
“Me either,” I said and smiled.
We sat on the roof and introduced ourselves. Her name was Monica and she lived by herself on the first floor. There was an elegant gap between her front teeth, and her eyebrows were prominent, high black curves. I told her I was staying with my mother and that I had come from California.
“But you had the beach and all that sunshine.”
“Guess it wasn’t for me.” I pulled my cigarettes from my purse, offering her one.
“Unfiltered Camels,” she said. “When my husband was alive, this was his brand.”
She looked too young to be a widow, maybe twenty-five at the most.
“Bruce was a drinker all his life,” she said. “The only thing he loved more than me. It was cirrhosis. He had been sick for almost two years. It’s hard watching someone vanish like that.”
I told her that I was sorry. “How long were you married?”
“Six years. All of them right here.” Monica stood and tossed her cigarette over the roof. “Glad you came up here tonight.”
“Why’s that?”
“Because I was going to kill myself. Only the roof didn’t seem high enough.” Monica walked away and laughed, like the joke was on me.
* * *
—
“What’re your plans today?” My mother stood in my doorway, fresh from the shower in a towel and struggling with the clasp on her sterling crucifix necklace. Her hair was still wet, dripping down her collarbones.
“I don’t know,” I said, sitting up in bed. “Maybe I’ll look for jobs.” I had enough savings to carry me for a while, though my mother insisted that working wasn’t only about money—it was about structure, purpose, keeping track of days.
She set a slip of paper across my quilt. “Groceries. See how much it costs to feed us each week.” Tortillas, skim milk, Diet Coke, eggs, coffee, various meats, and many fruits. I pinched the list with two fingers and placed it on my nightstand.
“I’ll go when I get some time.”
“All you have is time. That’s the problem, mija.” My mother turned around and reached for something in the hallway. She handed me a small shopping bag. “The salesgirl said it’ll cover anything. Burns to rashes. Now you don’t have to be ashamed to go outside.”
“I’m not ashamed.” Inside the bag was a bottle of foundation. I tested the color on my wrist, a perfect match. “No one sees me, anyway. People pretend they don’t see a girl with a bruised face.”
I left around noon, walking through the park. It was overcast and the breeze carried a slight chill. I went past a homeless man who slept beneath a spruce tree near the pavilion. I saw him most days under the branches with his rootlike hands and ancient face. Today he was crouched over a coverless book, his trash bags of things neatly stacked around his legs. With his eyes to the page, he said, “It’s going to rain, miss. Make sure you grab an umbrella.” I thanked him and continued across the park.
Several yards ahead, a woman lay on a beach towel in a bikini, her legs halfway bent, their color a natural bronze. Her skin was brilliant with tanning oil and she wore large, Audrey Hepburn sunglasses. As I got closer, I realized it was Monica.
“I know what you’re thinking,” she said as I stood above her. “Why am I tanning with no sun? It’s a great time to be at the park. Everyone’s at work. It’s empty. Well, not that empty.” She lowered her sunglasses and glanced around. “Cheesman used to be a cemetery. Did you know that?”
“No,” I said, shaking my head.
“Look around. The land is uneven. The headstones were moved, but hundreds, maybe thousands of bodies were left behind. Mostly the poor, people without family, that kind of thing. They say it’s haunted.”
“Where did you hear all this?”
Monica removed her sunglasses, revealing hazel eyes and a trickle of freckles. “I just know it. My family’s from Colorado. More generations than I can count.”
“Me, too, on my mom’s side. But my dad was from Detroit.”
“Then you know a lot about death and decay.” She laughed, rubbing her lean arms, trying to generate warmth. She edged back on her elbows and with her right hand patted the grass, offering me a spot beside her. I shook my head, explaining that I was on my way to get groceries. Then I needed to look for jobs.
“What kind of work?”
“Anything, I guess. I worked at a bank in California, but I didn’t like it.”
“Not glamorous enough for you?” Monica poked her arms through a beige sweater. “I need help clearing out my apartment. I can’t stand to look at my husband’s things without crying. I would pay you.”
The sky groaned and rain clouds sagged over the city. I imagined the moisture was good for the grass, bones and all. “When would you want me to come over?”
Monica huffed across her sunglasses and cleaned them on her sweater. She checked her reflection in the lenses, sliding her hair from one shoulder to the other. She smiled at herself before putting the sunglasses back on her face. “How about tonight?”
* * *
—
Monica’s apartment was long and wide with three bedrooms and a patio covered in thick vines and wicker chairs. Seashell ashtrays littered the end tables and countertops. A steady breeze sent lime-colored drapes fluttering over the hardwood floor. On brick walls were many framed photos of a husky white-haired man in his mid-fifties and his pretty young wife, Monica.
“That’s Bruce.” Monica pointed to one of the photos. “Always laughing. Always in that stupid leather jacket. I was crazy about him. People thought I was after his money, but I wasn’t. He was so kind, Liz. The kindest man I had ever met.”
She sighed and headed into the kitchen. I heard her knocking around in the freezer. Ice fell to the floor, a drawer opened, a glass chimed. Then I heard crying. When Monica reappeared with two drinks, her mascara was off her lashes, darkening the high bones surrounding her eyes. She handed me a drink and continued talking.
“He owned the jazz club downtown, the Mermaid Room. We met when I was only nineteen, sneaking in with a fake ID. It wasn’t love at first sight, but I grew into him.”
“Do you think that’s true?” I asked. “Love at first sight.”
“Heck yes.”
“I met a guy once,” I said, hesitantly. “At this tiny bar with overpriced drinks. He teased me about wearing no bra and I made fun of his beaded prayer bracelet. I kept thinking he felt familiar, but also new. I had never wanted someone so quickly. We ended up having sex in his car a few blocks away. I’m pretty sure he had a wife or girlfriend at home. I wanted to cry
when it was over.”
Monica dropped her gaze, focusing on her drink. The lines of a smirk widened her narrow jaw. “Shit, that’s not love. That’s someone who needs a car wash.”
We didn’t pack any boxes that day. We talked and drank into the night. The room grew dark, neither of us switching on a lamp. Monica told me more about Bruce. He had rescued her from a string of meaningless jobs bartending. She didn’t have to work anymore. She filled her time with salsa dancing and making altars for the dead, colorful wooden boxes with skulls and yellow flowers. “But since Bruce has been gone, I don’t feel like doing much.”
Monica went quiet. The skin around her eyes twitched, as though an invisible mosquito drew blood from her eyelids. “I loved him so much, Liz. It’s like this chunk of me has been ripped from my body. And if I ever forget he’s gone, I hate myself.”
I took her in my arms and she dampened my right shoulder with tears. Her skin was warm but her hair, resting against my cheek, was cold. I looked around and realized that I was unable to recall the last time I had spent an afternoon with a girlfriend. Time didn’t feel as long or wasteful in the company of another woman.
At some point, I told her about California, all the details I could remember—his wintergreen soap, the image of his fiancée’s blond bobby pins scattered across a burgundy bath mat, the garbled feeling of running my tongue over my broken tooth after he hit me in the face.
Monica lightly walked her fingers along the bridge of my nose. “I could see it beneath your makeup…Does it hurt?”
“Yeah. I can barely wash my face.”
She pulled back. Her face seemed poreless, covered in mist. “You have two things to look forward to. Someday it won’t hurt anymore. And someday he’ll be dead.”
* * *
—
The following Sunday, I met my mother after Mass. From where I sat on a marble bench outside the cathedral, I watched the brass insignia doors open. People poured in two streams out of the church toward the parking lots. My mother broke away from the crowd, stepping down the white stone steps in her creamy dress and tennis shoes. She squinted at my face before hugging me.
“Nice of you to show up,” she said. “Only an hour late.”
“Come on, Mama. I’m here for our walk.”
Exercise, she believed, would keep my mind off California. It worked for her. She maintained a strict walking schedule, no less than an hour a day. That’s how she hardly thought of my father and the violence he put her through.
We crossed Colfax Avenue and passed several blocks of liquor stores and pawnshops. We entered Cheesman through a dead-end street, where a slender path fed into a grass clearing. A dozen or so women and children were there doing yoga. A little girl expertly bent her body in half, her blond ringlets bouncing onto the ground. My mother watched with darting eyes. After some time, she turned to me, asking about Monica, referring to her as that skinny girl from the first floor.
“I’m helping clear out her apartment. She’s a widow. Isn’t that sad, Mama? Especially for someone so young.”
“Imagine if she had lost her husband of fifty years instead. Age has nothing to do with sadness.”
We came upon the pavilion, with its high-reaching Greek pillars and airy veranda, where a woman sat on a green sheet, a baby blanket slung over her left shoulder as she nursed an infant. My mother and I watched for a moment. It was a pretty sight, the white marble, the sunlight crisp. Then, from the trees, a black dog with wild eyes came slinking forward.
The nursing woman’s hair fell into her face as she cocked her neck from side to side. “Go away,” she yelled. “Get out of here.” But the dog growled and stepped toward her. The woman twisted to the side and the blanket fell from her shoulder, revealing her baby’s hairless head on the edge of her tiny white breast. My mother, quick to react, ran to her, covering her breast and yelling for me to get help with the dog.
The homeless man from beneath the spruce tree had emerged from the branches. He walked past me, hunched over and rickety, his salt-and-pepper hair like a frayed bird’s nest. He broke into a sprint through the grass, over the stone steps, and onto the ice-like floor of the pavilion. He hollered as he flung his fists and kicked into the air. The dog’s muscular body curved into the shape of a shark’s fin as it snarled and snapped. The homeless man held his ground and the animal soon retreated, leaving the veranda silent once more. The woman with the infant thanked my mother, ignoring the homeless man as he retreated, slouched and small, back from where he came.
“He’s a nice man,” I told my mother later as we entered our building’s lobby.
“He cares about other people.” My mother paused at the elevator doors. “Most men don’t know the pleasure.”
As we rode the elevator, I studied my mother’s face, the corkscrew-shaped scar dangling along her jaw. It had never occurred to me, but there was a time before that scar, before my mother knew my father, when her face was still unbroken and she was still young.
* * *
—
Monica and I started in the front room. Bruce had collected antiques—cigar boxes filled with hawk feathers, handheld apache drums, little shoe brushes made of ivory and boar bristles. Resting on an end table was a pair of silver pistols with curlicue designs over the grip panels. Monica pointed one at my forehead and pulled the trigger. A bluish flame rose from the barrel.
“Gotcha!” she said. “I love these old lighters.”
While we stacked boxes, Monica spoke about Bruce’s childhood. His father was a traveling salesman and his mother was a Valium addict. As for Monica, she didn’t know her father and, while she was growing up, her mother often sold their furniture for booze. At one point during her childhood, they had a cardboard box for a kitchen table. Monica would watch cartoons alone for hours on an orange shag carpet. Bruce was the same—he felt parented by spaghetti westerns, the Lone Ranger and Tonto, that sort of thing.
“I always told him Tonto means fool,” she said. “He claimed I was too literal.”
We soon moved on to the bathroom. In the mirror above the sink, I avoided looking at my face and watched Monica bend over the tub, her spine showing through her T-shirt, a grouping of winglike bones. Her reflection smeared away as I opened the medicine cabinet—jars of Italian cologne, half-used cans of shave gel, a razor flecked with white hair.
We worked together on the drawers near the sink. Among the cotton balls and hairbrushes was a yellow rubber duck, a sailor cap adorning his smiling head. Monica giggled, saying something about Bruce living like a child. She was close enough to my face that I could see the white skin of her scalp. I asked if she and Bruce had ever wanted children.
“No, I was pregnant before. When I was seventeen. I had no money. The guy took off. But the couple that adopted her had a lot of land up in the mountains. I remember that. Seemed like a good place for a little girl to run around.”
“Maybe someday she’ll come looking for you.”
“No, I’m not cut out for motherhood.” Monica laughed.
“Where should I take all this?” I pointed to the boxes we had packed.
“To a dumpster. I never want to see any of it again.”
I nodded, thinking of the several dumpsters along the park. We carried the boxes down the stairs to the parking lot.
“I have a great idea,” Monica said suddenly as we loaded the boxes into my car. “Let’s go out tonight. You can see Bruce’s old club. We can dance and drink. Maybe flirt a little.”
“Can’t. I’m having dinner with my mom.”
“Perfect. Bring her with you.” I frowned, thinking of my mom’s response.
“I can try,” I said.
That night, I waited until it was full dark. Then I tossed Bruce’s things into the dumpster on the park’s western edge, working up a sweat and breathing heavily as each box sailed from my arms. The
streetlamps made the clear tape covering the boxes shimmer like ribbons of water. When I was back in the car, I caught sight of myself in the rearview mirror. The makeup had sweated off my face. My mouth and nose seemed fused together in a greenish column and the almond-shaped corner of my right eye was plum red. My face, I realized, resembled some gruesome mask.
* * *
—
“What will I do there?” my mother asked. “Everyone will think I’m some old lady.” She was at the stove in a terry-cloth bathrobe and moccasin slippers, removing a whining teakettle from the burner. Her hair was pinned behind her ears and her face was covered in shining skin cream.
“You’ll have fun. You can have a drink or two. It won’t kill you.”
My mother shot me a look as if to say it very well might kill her. She filled a mug with steaming water and carried it to the table.
“Please, Mama.” I pulled a chair beside her. “You never go out.”
“That’s not true. I am at the college five days a week. I take my walks. I go to church. I am always out—just not with you or your little friend downstairs.” She ran her fingers along the mug’s brim. The heat fogged her light pink polish. “Come on, Liz. It’s silly.”
“I haven’t been out at all. I sit here all day. I’ve done nothing.”
“You act like all this is my fault.”
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