by Dave Eggers
Vale lapena? Is it worth it?
No, says Padilla’s mother without a second’s hesitation.
No, says Pepe Padilla, who during the Franco years used to ride trains and sleep under the stars to stand before a fighting bull. For the parents of a torero, “there is more pena than gloria.”
Sí, says Lidia, because you see his happiness!
Sí, says Juan Jose Padilla, smiling as wide as his new face permits him, because God is giving me my recompensa. Now I see better with one eye than two.
ALEXIS SCHAITKIN
Bones
FROM The Southwest Review
KAYLA AND LUZ WERE DESPERATE FOR BROKEN BONES. Splints, slings, casts, and layer upon layer of snowy gauze danced in their eyes each afternoon as they formulated their plans. They took the Bible from Mrs. Lopez’s shrine to the Virgin Mary and dropped it on each other’s fingers. They ran into the punching bag in Luz’s basement, which her brother Manuel used for training. They roller-skated down the big hill in the road, aiming for the patch of sand and gravel at the bottom.
But they chickened out every time: they pulled their fingers out from under the Bible, slowed before they hit the bag, swerved clear at the last possible second. Kayla tried to float up like a dead girl and watch herself from a place of tranquil indifference to her own pain, but at the critical moment she always darted back into herself.
“It’s like our bodies force us to protect them,” Kayla said.
“Like how you can’t hold your breath until you die because once you faint your body starts breathing for you,” Luz said.
Kayla imagined her skinny arm weighed down with stiff plaster and her classmates asking if it hurt. “It’s not so bad,” she would say, wincing just enough to let them know how much her snapped bones pained her.
Two of her classmates had already been touched by the kind of pain she was after. A boy blown off his bike by a passing truck had broken his femur. A girl thrown from her pony had cracked a rib. They seemed to know things she didn’t. They had been to the bottom, and they carried with them the things they had seen there. She was ready to be anointed and ennobled by suffering, to inhabit the world as a person who knew how bad bad could be.
Kayla and Luz had been inseparable for eight months, since the Lopez family arrived in town in September, a few weeks after the school year began. It was a wealthy town in the northernmost reaches of the New York suburbs. The school district was one of the very best in the nation. The houses, not Kayla’s or Luz’s, but most of them, were either architecturally jangly new luxury homes on dusty treeless plots (this was 1994, a few years before terms like Hummer House, Starter Castle, and McMansion caught on) or old-money country estates that burst out of their wooded surroundings like bright white teeth.
Kayla’s family—her mother Tammy, her grandfather, and she—lived in an apartment with tiny windows above a sushi restaurant on the street that led from the quaint downtown to the highway. The apartment stank of fish. The smell was so deeply ingrained it was as if the cotton in the curtains had come from a field fertilized with fish carcasses, as if the bumpy plaster walls were made of ground fish bones. Tammy covered the smell with vanilla air freshener, apple cinnamon candles, and spritzes of Angel, a perfume that came in a glass star.
The Lopezes rented a house at the edge of the school district that bordered a fifty-acre wetland. The basement was constantly flooding and the backyard was a slick of goose droppings. It was a shabby ’60s ranch house, the sort that went on the market in this town with the tagline “Tear down and build DREAM HOUSE” in the real estate listings.
Luz was the youngest of four children. Her brother Manuel was twenty and worked as a dancer for a DJ company. He could do a standing back flip and had a stomach like a case of gold bars. Pilar was sixteen and her body spilled over in all the right places (not at her stomach, like Kayla’s mother; even when Tammy was naked it looked like her stomach was pouring over the top of an invisible pair of too-tight jeans). Estela was thirteen and already fatter than Mrs. Lopez. Mrs. Lopez cleaned houses. Mr. Lopez did something for which he wore an olive green uniform. They had emigrated from Guatemala when Luz was four, and Luz had lived all kinds of places: Los Angeles, Phoenix, California’s Central Valley, and what seemed to Kayla like dozens of cities in Texas with Spanish names.
To the other children in their class, Kayla and Luz’s friendship was a natural thing that didn’t require explanation—outcast with outcast, that was all. Before Luz, Kayla had mostly kept to herself. There had been a time, a few years ago in kindergarten and first grade, when she had gone to other girls’ houses and eaten from their walk-in pantries and played with them in the gauzy pink enclaves of their canopy beds. But the few times she had girls over to the apartment, they were squeamish about the snacks Kayla offered. When their mothers picked them up the women spoke to her grandfather with strained politeness—who was this old man in a stained shirt, watching their daughters play?—as they scanned the dim apartment, smelled its salmony stink.
Now Kayla slept at Luz’s house on Friday and Saturday nights. Luz shared a bedroom with her sisters. Estela was always around.
“No plans tonight, Stelbell?” Luz would say very sweetly.
“Yeah, I have plans. Staying away from you two losers.”
Pilar usually went out. The high school pulled in students from several neighboring towns that were poorer and less white, and Pilar led a clique of Guatemalan girls, some of them born in the United States, some more recent arrivals than herself. She kept a stash of clothes from Charlotte Russe and Wet Seal under her bed, and the younger girls would watch as she tried on various combinations: a pleather miniskirt with a silver tank, a sparkly black halter top with red pants, a strapless pink dress so tight and thin you could see the floral print on her thong. Between outfits she hung out in her underwear and bra, sorting indecisively through her clothes and slinking around the room (stealing glimpses of herself in the mirror as she passed it).
Once, Pilar said “You’re staring,” and Kayla burned with shame. Now she stole glances only when the others weren’t looking. Looking at Pilar’s body filled her with a feeling of being left behind. Not because she would never look like that; she knew she would never look like that. But Luz probably would in a few years, and in Pilar’s body Kayla sensed the unlikelihood of their friendship surviving such a transformation.
If Manuel was out at a dancing gig, Pilar would throw a coat over her skimpy clothes and kiss her mama and papa goodbye on the cheek before her girlfriends picked her up. If Manuel was at home, she would fold her party clothes up as tiny as she could and stuff them into her purse, then put on a pair of loose jeans and a T-shirt. One time, before she learned, he’d made her unbutton her coat and sent her back up to change when he saw what she had on underneath.
“Be good,” he would say to her.
“Yes, Dad.”
“Remember—”
“You only have one reputation,” she would say.
After Pilar left, Kayla and Luz would retreat to the bedroom. Sometimes they tried to close the closet doors on their fingers, or to prick themselves with pins. For a full hour one night they took turns rolling off Pilar’s bed, which was raised high on cinderblocks.
“Keep your arm stiff when you fall,” Kayla said.
“I want my cast to be periwinkle,” Luz said.
“You’re so dumb,” said Estela, who had stopped in the doorway to watch.
“Where are your friends tonight? I don’t see them anywhere,” Luz said.
When Pilar returned home, she would tell the younger girls about her night as she washed the makeup from her face and brushed out her long hair. She strung along this white boy and that one, the captain of the lacrosse team, and a stoner who played guitar for her, and a nerd who was a little afraid of her. She told the girls that the older brothers of kids who ignored them had testicles like old grapes and penises that looked like little baby mice. The girls laughed until their stomachs hurt.<
br />
“It’s always the same,” Pilar said one night. “I’m bored of it all.” She flung her body onto her bed and looked up at the ceiling. “I met a boy tonight who said he can make the seven in my birth year into a five on my ID. He does it with chalk and red pencil. There are clubs in White Plains where you only have to be eighteen.”
“Mamá and Papá will never let you,” Estela said.
“I’ll tell them I’m sleeping at a friend’s.”
“They’ll call her parents to check.”
“Not if they’d have to speak English to them. Have I told you about my new friend Caitlin?” Pilar said with a smirk.
“No, make her Ashley!” Luz said.
“Jenna!” Estela said.
“Amber,” Kayla offered.
“Yes! Amber!” Pilar said, laughing. “You know your white girls, girl.”
Kayla was always the last one awake. Alone in the darkness, she would replay the night’s scenes in her head: Pilar appraising herself in her lingerie, Luz’s ritual meanness to Estela, and Pilar as Kayla loved her best—storytelling with her heavy black hair let down. For the rest of them this was normal, this was home; but for Kayla, even after several months, these nights were shot through with a frantic excitement. In the night’s dark, solitary phase, she enjoyed it all a second time, calmly. She had fallen in love with the operation of the Lopez sisters.
On Sunday mornings, Kayla piled into the minivan with the rest of them for church. The sisters waited in line for communion with pious expressions, clutched at the delicate gold crosses around their necks, and crossed themselves with great feeling. Kayla would wave her hand across her shoulders and up and down her face in what she hoped was a convincing imitation, and Mrs. Lopez would look at her with a kind, amused smile.
Tammy always pulled into the Lopezes’ driveway a little after lunchtime on Sunday to bring Kayla home. She never got out of the car. She exchanged a mutually disinterested wave with Mrs. Lopez, who stood in the doorway as Kayla gathered her things. The two women had never spoken.
“What are we?” Kayla asker her mother after the first service she attended.
“Protestant mutts. Why, what did you think you were, High Anglican?”
The rest of Sunday was spent in the apartment with her mother and grandfather. It was her mother’s one day off from the Crane House, a restaurant where the mothers of Kayla’s classmates lunched on turkey wraps and Niçoise salads. On Sundays, Tammy kept her feet up and caught up on the soaps she had taped during the week.
“Go out and play,” Tammy would say to Kayla. But “out” was just the gravel parking lot behind the building and the scrubby sliver of trees between the lot and a gas station. A few minutes after leaving the apartment she would slip back in and hope her mother wouldn’t decide to have a problem with it.
“Could we get a little news?” her grandfather might venture between episodes of the soaps.
“Get a little news on your other six days off,” Tammy would say.
Tammy liked to keep the lights off, like she was watching a movie. Through the tiny windows, the very bright sun outside seemed hostile and malevolent to Kayla. She could be bored to tears and still not want to leave the apartment and go out into the light. There was something about these afternoons that she at once hated and required, something about them that steeled her for the week ahead.
Tammy was twenty-seven years old. Her hair was dyed yellow and her skin had an orange tone from her weekly tan. When Kayla thought of her mother, she saw her dressed to go out: faded hip hug-gers, silver eye shadow, and gold hoop earrings with crystal hearts dangling in the centers.
The man Tammy thought was Kayla’s father was a casting agent who had come to her high school in central Pennsylvania looking for fresh-faced extras for a horror film when Tammy was sixteen. For the rest of her life she would see the other life she might have lived if he had spirited her away to Hollywood instead of leaving her, pregnant, in Juniata County. It ran alongside this life like the beautiful and untouchable scenery falling away at the sides of a train.
Tammy’s mother, Pearl, had left when Tammy was thirteen. Tammy took over the management of the household immediately: cooking, paying bills, doing her father’s wash, buying him new corduroys when his old ones had worn smooth. Often dinner was just soup from a can, but even then it was Tammy who dumped the soup into a saucepan on the stove. He let her do these things for him. He did not tell her to remain a child.
“You’re too young to be sitting around waiting to die,” she told him for the first time when she was fourteen. It was what her mother used to say to him. Then Tammy had thought her mother was cruel for saying it, and had hugged her father’s neck and kissed his cheek and told him she loved him.
Tammy remembered her mother as a distant, blunt woman who clung to rules of personal hygiene with evangelical intensity but was altogether unable to maintain a clean and tidy household. By the time she left, Tammy knew her temper—its cycles and rhythms and the things that were like fire-starter to it—as intimately as she knew her own body.
Pearl had worked on the line at Empire Kosher Poultry as a salter. She coated the opalescent skins of chickens (and, once every eight days, of turkeys) with coarse salt. Perhaps because her hands were so accustomed to handling things that didn’t care how they were handled, she handled Tammy with the same rough and unceremonious physicality: every night she twisted cotton rags into Tammy’s wet hair so tightly her scalp throbbed; she didn’t work knots out of Tammy’s fine hair so much as drag the brush through until the hairs broke apart.
Tammy’s father was known in the town as a sad case, a meandering soul who could never hold down a job. Friends dug up temporary work for him. He loaded vending machines, folded clothing, polished cars, and harvested for Amish farmers around the county. When he took Pearl out for their first date, he arrived on her doorstep carrying a paper bag full of blackberries. The bottom of the bag had already softened from the juices. Purple ran down his hands.
Pearl felt her heart crack like a cube of ice submerged suddenly in warm water. It was the sweetest gesture that had ever been directed at her. She was twenty-three and this was the first date of her life. Everyone knew her mother, Vera, was in an institution in Harrisburg, and it was gospel among the men in town that the cunt of an Empire girl smelled like raw chicken flesh. She couldn’t blame men for staying away, especially when she knew the part of her mother that rattled inside of her. She felt it like gritty iron filings, which at odd moments of attraction would stand on end. “It’s the only place for me,” her mother had told her, stroking Pearl’s hair with a rigid hand, on the day Pearl’s father drove her to Harrisburg. As Pearl watched them drive away, the filings stood at attention along the front of her body, pulled in the direction of her mother, who disappeared down the road.
Pearl pulled him inside and washed the juice from his hands. Despite what she knew about him, she put her hopes in him. For a while, it seemed she was a good influence. When they married, he’d been working at the Army Navy Surplus store for four months. But it didn’t last.
When a light bulb burnt out in the house it would stay that way for days, sometimes weeks, until Pearl stood over him in his chair, pointed to it and said, “What’s that?”
“A burnt out bulb,” he would say.
“And what are you?” she would say.
“The man of the house.”
And then he would finally get up and change it.
Kayla’s eyes were locked on the sky. Vines tangled through the sparse crowns of thin trees. At the top of her stride the trees slipped from view and she saw only the sky, which was colorless today, and alternated between looking flat like a sheet of paper and infinitely deep, depending on how she thought about it as she looked at it. Mud sucked at her sneakers. She was walking with Luz through the swamp behind the Lopezes’ house to the pond at its center, and hoping to trip on a root or a rock and cut herself. But of course she couldn’t help stealing glances at the g
round and lifting her feet when she knew a rock was coming.
Luz carried her father’s fishing pole and a pink plastic bucket. Kayla held a dish of leftover cooked meat for bait. If they caught a fish, Mrs. Lopez would gut and filet it and set a dish with morsels of fried fish on the table between Luz and Kayla at dinner, alongside whatever else she had cooked.
“You going fishing?” Estela had asked before they set out.
“Would you like to be invited, Stelbell?” Luz said.
“Go slip in the shit,” Estela said.
Rotting stumps rose through bright green sludge at the edges of the pond. The air was thick with the sweetness of goose droppings.
Today they only caught three bitty brown fish no bigger than sardines. Back at the house, Luz handed the bucket to her mother. Kayla could hear the fish spasming in the inch of swamp water at the bottom of the bucket. Mrs. Lopez smacked Luz gently upside the head. “Too small,” she said. “How I cut?” Luz looked up at her with a syrupy smile. Mrs. Lopez sighed and took the bucket into the kitchen. A few minutes later, Luz led Kayla back to the kitchen to peek in at her mother bent over the little fish, a knife in her fat hands, muttering to herself in Spanish as she did her best to filet them. Luz laughed and Mrs. Lopez spun around. Kayla felt her face redden with shame as they fled up the stairs.
Upstairs, Luz changed out of her muddy shorts into track pants.
“You forgot new underwear,” Kayla said.
“You don’t need underwear. It doesn’t do anything,” Luz said, like this was obvious.
Immediately it seemed to Kayla that it was true, and she was embarrassed it hadn’t occurred to her before. They decided that the next day they wouldn’t wear any to school.
After dinner, the girls retreated to the bedroom. Pilar lay on her bed listening to the radio. Estela sat on the floor with her homework in her lap. Luz and Kayla drew tattoos on their hands with marker.