by Dale Peck
There are some experiences that only make sense while they’re happening, others that don’t add up till they’re over and done with. I remember waking up to a quiet house the morning after my daughter married Ricardo and thinking, So this is what it’s all about. You raise them up to let them go. With Harney it was the other way around. He’s been gone more than a decade now, and with each passing day he feels more and more like something I dreamed up. The feelings he stroked from me are vague and prickly like the clotted air around the power station, and sometimes, at the strangest times—when I’m washing dishes, say, or when I’m sitting in the middle of Fifth and Encenada waiting to make a left-hand turn—a hot wave of him washes over my skin and I feel embarrassed, as if someone had caught me in public with my hand in my drawers. With Theresa it was like my daughter. I tried starting a pool among the waitresses as to when she’d cave, just a joke you understand, I myself didn’t think she would cave, but before the first date came up Anthony’d already dragged her into his cave by her hair. Whereas with Kennedy it was like it was with Harney. I don’t actually remember inviting her in, don’t remember locking the door or serving her coffee. The coffee, I know, was already made—I always had a pot going by two-thirty, three o’clock on Thursdays—but who poured I couldn’t tell you, and for all I know she called the police on herself. At any rate it was she who unlocked the door and let them in. What I do remember her saying was that it wasn’t the heel of her shoe that killed him. She said she hadn’t broken off her heel in his ribs until she stamped on his prostrate body. St. Anthony of the Vine, the martyrdom of: he served her the glass of wine he always served them after they finished, but Kennedy dropped hers, it was an accident, she stressed, but she still managed to spill wine down the front of Anthony’s shirt and break Nicky Junger’s glass. She stained Nicky’s carpet too, a little archipelago of purple blobs that people tend not to notice, Nicky told me later, next to the continental smear of Anthony’s lifeblood, but it was still only the spilled wine Kennedy was concerned with when Anthony called her a bitch—the spilled wine and of course the broken glass. She was just standing up with a few of the larger pieces in her hand when Anthony called her a clumsy little bitch and slapped her, cutting her cheek with the turned-in diamond on his pinkie ring, and depending on whose account you believe it was either accidentally or on purpose that the stem of Nicky Junger’s broken wine glass penetrated Anthony’s throat when Kennedy slapped him back. He wouldn’t even look at me, Kennedy said right before the police took her away, but I just shook my head. Mira, Kennedy said then, you don’t think I’d intentionally kill my own sister’s husband, do you? To which the prosecuting attorney later replied, You wouldn’t think she’d sleep with him either. And even I have to admit it’s hard to escape the idea of hostile intent when you look at those pictures of Anthony with the circular dimpled base of a wine glass filling the hollow of his throat looking for all the world like a suction cup, you know, the kind you use to stick a mirror to shower-stall mylar or a sign in your rear window. if you can read this you’re too damn close! Pottery Barn, eleven ninety-five, Nicky Junger said in response to the prosecutor’s question, and she even held up an unbroken glass so that the nine men and three women of the jury could see the full two and a half inches of stem that Kennedy Albright had buried in Anthony’s throat. Nicky told me a gasp went through the courtroom when she produced that glass—said she herself convicted Kennedy when, pinkie ring or no pinkie ring, disfiguring scar or little old scratch on her cheek, she tried to balance Anthony’s slap against Kennedy’s retaliatory gesture. But Nicky, I argued with her, think who was slapping her. He wasn’t a saint, he married her sister. Correction, Nicky said. Theresa married him—the fool. Which, I have to admit, is what I myself called Theresa the Wednesday after the Tuesday she missed her third shift in two weeks. I drove down to Monterrey yesterday, was all Theresa said, and even though Monterrey isn’t exactly down from Saches—in the same way Saches isn’t exactly down from Dallas—all I said was, Why on earth didn’t you call in first? I believe they call it a Monterrey divorce, is what Theresa said. Or do they just call it a Mexican divorce? Well, I told her I was firing her for skipping out on yet another shift but if I’m being honest I was really firing her for being a fool. Theresa Blanchette, is what I told her, you are the biggest fool on either side of the border, but she only shook her head. Theresa DeVine now, she said. She dropped her nametag on the counter, twisted her new ring on her finger, faded letters on a sticky label replaced by a loop of beaten gold. We got us a Mexican wedding too. In the months to come—by which I mean in the months before Anthony got around to seducing his wife’s sister—that last gesture of Theresa’s haunted me. She twisted that ring on her finger as though the marriage it stood for were as solid as its circle, without beginning, end, or interruption. But there’s a difference between a ring and a marriage, a thing and the idea of it. An idea isn’t a sprung coil of facts, it’s just an equation measuring the space between the world and the words that float around it. Meaning’s always a relationship. X is X because of its distance from Y, but also because of how close it is to Z. And while we’re at it, tell me this: why is it always X, Y, and Z or A, B, and C? Why always the first or last three letters of the alphabet? Another example: the relationship of my grandsons (Fowler, Ferris, and Rodrigo, a triumvirate typical of a border town, even if their parents live in Dallas now) to my homemade apple pie. It’s significantly altered if I serve that pie with store-bought ice cream, which is to say that if I serve it alone they leave half on their plates but if I pile enough Ben and Jerry’s on it they eat it all. Which says, I know, something about my pie, but also says something about my grandsons and how their parents are raising them. My maternal grandmother was a terrible cook too—gingersnaps are what she made when I came over, and you could’ve shingled a chicken coop with them. But I’d’ve never dreamed of leaving the table without cleaning up everything she’d taken the time to prepare for me. Which is why—to return to my original point—Theresa’s gesture with the ring stuck with me. Because call it what you will, Mexican wedding, or boda, or Act II in the tragedy of St. Anthony of the Vine, it wasn’t two months after Theresa and Anthony went down to Monterrey that Anthony was back in the café, alone. It was around ten. Another in-between time, the breakfast crowd gone but too early for lunch, so that when Anthony strolled through the door the place was empty except for Alvin Porterhouse and Edgar Taylor smoking their tenth or eleventh one-last-cigarette-before-we-head-out. Anthony sat at the counter instead of his usual booth but he ordered tomato soup same as always, and I kind of kept one eye on him as I prepped for lunch, but all he did was stare down into his bowl. Then I heard the bells tinkle as Alvin and Edgar finally headed out and more or less on cue Anthony said, Can I interest you in a proposition, Mira? All at once I saw those eyes I’d seen focused on Theresa—the eyes that had looked like wishing wells to me—and even though my hair was all wound up in a hairnet I still found myself patting it in place. Why, Anthony, I said, turning, but he was still staring into his soup bowl. Theresa’s got herself a job at First National, he said. Telling. She’s a teller, I mean. Teller’s hours. By now I was standing in front of him and those eyes made it as far up as my navel, which despite myself I was sucking as flat as I could, but when Anthony said, I’d like to use your trailer if I could, I let it pooch out over my apron. You ought to be ashamed of yourself, I said. You ain’t but six weeks married. Seven, Anthony said. He didn’t take his eyes off my stomach. I told her, he said. What did you tell her? I told her who I was, Anthony said. Anthony, I demanded, but then I broke off. Why don’t you ever look at me when I’m talking to you! Anthony let go of his spoon then. He put the hand that had held it on his forehead. At first he just rubbed the dome of his head, smooth and spotted above his tufted fringe, and then he tilted his head back and managed to lift up his lids as far as my mouth maybe, or my nose, but then his eyes fell all the way back to the counter. But still there had been that blue, the
blue of the earth seen from the moon. There had been two of them, the world and its twin. Ocular myasthenia gravis, Anthony said. Do what? I said. You asked me why I don’t look at you. I have a condition called ocular myasthenia gravis. The muscles in my eyelids are failing. In a few more years I won’t be able to open them at all. Anthony, I—I shook my head. Why did you bother to marry her? Anthony shrugged. Women are as different as countries, he said. It takes a different strategy to conquer each one. Marriage is what it took to get Theresa. And do you know what? I took him at his word. I believed him is what I’m saying. I bought his explanation for why he’d married Theresa even as I knew that occult Mayan Indian gravies—it wasn’t until later on I looked it up, I wanted to get it right at the trial—was just a polite way of saying I wasn’t worth the effort, and perhaps I let him get away with the whole conquering countries line because, despite myself, I was hurt that he hadn’t tried to invade me. But I still wouldn’t let him use my trailer for his trysts. That it turned out to be Nicky Junger who did struck me at first as just my bad luck—I was over the hill and not worth climbing, but every Thursday I got the privilege of looking out my window at greener pastures. But then he started sending them over. A woman wants to chat, he told me the day after someone who called herself Raylene Daylong had knocked on my trailer door. I figure they can talk to you as much as me. Of course I knew why he was sending them to me—and it wasn’t what he told them, so he could clean up Nicky’s place before she got back. He sent them to me in lieu of himself. A token of what had been withheld. An apology even, almost. He wanted me to know I was still good for something, and for my part I accepted his once-a-week surrogate into my house, be she barely out of high school or middle-aged and freshly dyed. Every Thursday after I got home from the café I vacuumed and made a pot of coffee and let some flush-faced floozy sit at my kitchen table and reapply her lipstick. Their talk was frank—loose, I want to say, but that’s probably just jealousy. At any rate Anthony’s women used words in my trailer they’d’ve never used in their own homes, until at some point they realized I wasn’t a fellow traveler and then, cheeks freshly reddened with modesty—embarrassment, I want to say, shame—they would take their leave, and after they left I washed their lipstick off my cups in the same way Anthony must have washed it from his mouth. But the only time I saw the man himself was in the café, pinkie ring on one hand and wedding ring on the other. He always turned his pinkie ring in before he started eating but his wedding ring he let hang any which way on his thin finger, crooked, lopsided, a hoop tossed at the fair that just barely manages to lasso its pylon. What was it they saw in him? A skinny bald man with lazy eyes pushing sixty. His lids were so tired that he ate his soup with his eyes closed, spattering the counter and sometimes his shirt with red drops it’s hard not to see as harbingers of his fate, and only when he paid did he look at my apron, at my hand passing him his change. Ocular myasthenia gravis may have explained that but it didn’t explain why the man could say It’s you to a different woman every week and be believed every time. A man who, six months buried in the cemetery behind Our Lady of Sorrows, still had the occasional female caller knocking on Nicky Junger’s door come Thursday afternoon. It was the one point missed by every story Rolanda Ezquivel clipped from the Dallas papers for me (witnesses weren’t allowed to read about the case while it was going on): that he didn’t conquer these women as much as they invited him in. In fact it was an old-fashioned gladiator match, that trial, the stories written about it: everyone a victim but no one innocent. You could have your blood and drink it too. But that’s what happens when a personal tragedy explodes into the world. The people disappear and there are only plotlines left, equations, X and Y and Z, A and B and C, until history moves on and then what’s left? Nothing. Nothing but words and pictures. At forty-seven Kennedy Albright had somehow been cast as the innocent girl pushed beyond her comprehension by an experienced seducer, in direct contrast to her older sister, an aged fleshy former beauty queen (by which they seemed to mean Winter Homecoming 1971) who thought she could trade up at the end of her life. At any rate that’s what the prosecutor said. Love, the prosecutor said, like life itself, starts to die the moment it’s born. That’s why love, he went on, like life itself, requires institutions to sustain it, nurture it through the long years of its senescence. We call those institutions marriage and the state. Both are fraught, both compromises that sacrifice freedom’s anarchy in the interests of stability. Marriage’s yoke hardens its team while ensuring they seam a single track. The state’s grasp on its citizens is more convulsive, now light, now nearly crushing. Citizens of the state of Texas and of this great country, the prosecutor said, we are here today to ensure that Kennedy Albright does not wiggle out of justice’s grip. By exiling her from the state you will be protecting and strengthening what remains, so that perhaps Theresa Albright Blanchette DeVine can reclaim her place among self-respecting law-abiding citizens. To which the defense replied, It wasn’t my client who first mocked the institution of marriage: it was yours. Which answer didn’t keep Kennedy out of jail but at least saved her life. Or at least that was Cardo’s take on the whole thing. Mami, he said that Christmas—they hadn’t been able to make it down for Thanksgiving after all—calm down. It’s not like he means what he says. He’s speaking to a higher purpose: conviction. Am I the only one who sees the contradiction in that? I said. That the law has to betray its convictions in order to secure a conviction? Give it a rest, Mami. You think too much, you hurt your brain. I’m going to go fix up your porch now. But Cardo, I said, following him, what’s the difference between the stories the prosecutor told and the stories Anthony told? How long is it before people lose their faith in the institution of law just like Kennedy lost her faith in Anthony? I think someone’s projecting a little, Cardo said. Ay, Mami, he went on, hauling the scattered cinderblocks of my porch to one side, only in America would an old man’s exuberance lead to talk of revolution. I stood in the elevated doorway and looked down at Cardo’s white-shirted back, beginning to dot with sweat as he dragged the blocks out of the way. Exuberance? Cardo, he called them countries. He said he had to conquer them. And he was good as his word, wasn’t he? Cardo said, raking smooth the mangy patch of dirt below my door. Words want to be true, he went on, and people want them to be true. He set his rake down and reached for the first block and said, If they don’t start out true then people tend to make them true, and then he laid the block with a thud in the soft earth. All I’m asking, Cardo, is for a little honesty, in love, in law. In life. Cardo edged one block next to another, three wide, three deep. Where’s the fun in that? he said, his voice distant, distracted by the effort of aligning the blocks. Who’s talking about fun, Cardo? Mami, Cardo interrupted me as he laid the first block of the second tier heavily on the base, listen to me. The block made a dry scraping noise as he slid it into place. Once upon a time your Texas was part of my country, Cardo said. Your California, your Arizona, your Nuevo México were all a part of viejo Mexico. You like the old country so much, Cardo, why not move back? Listen, Mami, Cardo said, smacking the second-tier blocks in place faster than he had the first, one up against the others, three across, two deep, leaving a block-wide step. There is a reason why your side won. A reason why there is no INS in Mexico, no border guards to keep the Americans out, no dogs sniffing their pockets for drugs. A channel of sweat ran down his back now as, grunting, he lifted the first block of the third tier and let it fall in place just a few inches below my feet. What’re you saying, Cardo, that might makes right? To the victor belongs the spoils? That Anthony got what he deserved? I couldn’t resist adding, even though it didn’t quite follow. All I’m saying, Cardo panted, hauling the second block of the third tier over, is that your grandsons wear shoes instead of making them in a factory outside Oaxaca. There was one block left and Cardo turned for it with a sigh. I’m saying that your daughter’s skin is too fair for the Chihuahua sun, he said, pushing the block wearily into place, and then he wiped the sweat from
his forehead and smeared a little dirt in its place. I love Mexico is what I’m saying, he said finally, squinting up at me, but for my wife’s sake, my children’s, I live in the U.S. of A., because your greedy gringo government lets me provide for my family in a way that my poncho-wearing presidente does not. Hmph, I sniffed. Your children won’t even eat my apple pie. I see them once, maybe twice a year, and they won’t even eat my apple pie. Cardo just shook his head then, held one hand up to me. C’mon, Mami, let’s go pick your finicky American grandsons up from the park and buy them ice cream. When we get back I’ll see what I can do about your carpet. I had to think for a moment, then I remembered: the shag strands had gotten tangled in the vacuum’s rollers and I’d had to hack them out with a knife. It seemed to me that my efforts to tell Cardo the story of St. Anthony of the Vine had been similarly crude, a rescue operation that lost as much as it saved. I make the pies myself, I said now. Homemade, I said, but then I remembered Anthony’s words. Trailer-made, I said, but Cardo just shook his head. They like ice cream, he said. Give them what they like, they eat it all. Now come on, you know how your daughter hates to be kept waiting. But still I hung back. I pointed to the porch. Shouldn’t you test it first? Mami, it’s fine. It’s cinderblock, it’s not going nowhere, let’s go. I looked down at the blocks. Yesterday they’d been too heavy for me to lift but today I doubted they would hold my weight. I wanted an assurance that these blocks would be more concrete than ocular myasthenia gravis, a proof against sorrow, not the cause of it. Cardo, I said, I can hardly afford a broken hip at my age. Mami, Cardo said. For seven months you climbed in and out of your house on one wobbly block. What is this about? Cardo, I said then, he wouldn’t even look at me. He couldn’t be bothered. And Cardo. Sweet Cardo. He’d built his three-tiered pyramid two times, he could build it a thousand times and every time it would come out the same, and now he ascended it like a gold medalist climbing to the topmost platform and looked right at me with eyes the color of the soil his rebuilt porch stood upon. Mami, my son-in-law said, and he put one of his hands right on top of my breast. He only won those women because they were already lost. He knocked on my ribs with a hand callused from years of honest labor and gritty besides, from the work he’d done for me. Love like that is a dictator, Cardo said, still staring me in the eye, but you are already empress of your own heart.