Short Stories

Open Eyes

Jimmy, is that you?

This Time, Yes

Open Eyes

Winner of the El Andar prize for literary excellence 2000. First prize for fiction. Judged by Sandra Cisneros.

When my father-in-law walks in the front door, my mother-in-law starts sharpening knives. They haven't spoken for almost three years. Victor slaps down El Opinión; Dolores slides the steel through the slit in the back of the can opener.

"¿Como estas?" he says to me. "How are you?" he adds in case I haven't understood.

"Muy bien. Gracias," I reply with my seventh grade Spanish. The only other phrase I can think of at this moment is the dialogue in the reader about a woman trying to buy a tie for her husband from a confused salesman. She finally exclaims "¡No, no, no Senor! ¡Mi esposo no le gusta esos!"

There is silence and chile in the kitchen. A huge ceramic pot of salsa verde sits lukewarm on the gas range. Just under the tang of the chile, I smell Pinesol and Dolores' sweat. I can feel the heat of just fried bacon, the fat collected in an aluminum bowl under the range. The air is dusty with grease, and my father-in-law pulls the chain that starts the wood ceiling fan. Dolores ignores him and slices onions and peppers, tossing the vegetables into a pan of bubbling oil.

I can still taste the boiled skins of tomatillos and the silver hot of jalapeños against steel. Earlier, Dolores and I shredded chicken, my fingers deep in the grease of skin and fat; next to me, a plate of steaming gray bones.

Dolores looked at me, working a piece of chicken between her teeth. "I wish for my daughters to never feel what I felt for Victor." She shook her head. "Always I was waiting for him. I would sit, children asleep, and he would come in at eleven or twelve at night." She looked at me proudly, her left eye hazy with cataract. "I never asked him where he was. He never knew how I waited."

I said nothing because I had heard these stories before. For twelve years, I had been visiting Dolores' house with my husband Andreas, her fourth son, sitting at the cracked tile counter during our visits, first with babies on my lap, and then alone, listening to her words, peeling tomatillos, pulling black veins from the backs of shrimp, the heat and grease on my face, chile pricking my skin.

I listened and already knew how three-year-old Victor Jr. walked to the store by himself the morning after Dolores labored and bore baby Mario, her third son. Just minutes after Mario's birth and seconds after naming him, Victor Senior put on his work clothes and left. It was not like in Tacuba with Tía Sofia the midwife, la partera, who stayed through both Dolores' labors, sometimes reading the Tarot while Dolores moaned, who brewed brown teas from leaves she bought at market and ministered to Dolores from a wooden spoon. Sofia had been there to catch Victor Jr. and Rigo, but Dolores was in Tijuana alone without her Tía or Mamá. She had not wanted to leave Tacuba, but Victor was certain things would be better in Tijuana. Sore from the big baby boy, exhausted from labor and worrying, Dolores lay on her bed, certain only that she would die.

But she did not die and Victor Jr. went to buy milk and bread with a peso and a note pinned to his collar, and he finally came home with the groceries after an anxious half-hour.

Later, Dolores thanked God and la Virgen for the three miscarriages between Mario and Andreas, one tiny twin girls with feet the size of daisies. I knew how she let Andreas' hair grow into long seal black curls, keeping a ribbon in his hair until he was old enough to know it was wrong. Once Dolores showed me a picture of Andreas sitting on a burro, a pink ribbon on the top of his head. "Mi borragito," she still says when we come to visit, rubbing her hand over his curls, indeed tight as lamb's wool, strands of gray now running through the black.

And when Catalina and Francisca finally were born (both with hair straight and black as piano keys), Dolores was too tired to put anything in their hair. Then, at forty-four, she learned she was pregnant with Francisca, she took to her bed, scaring the boys who made pancakes for themselves in the morning. "Come here," she called to each of them. "Let me tell you. I love you. Be good. Listen to your father. These are the things I can tell you."

She did not die, thanks to God. And just when Dolores stopped throwing up and could stand, the doctor told her that there was a possibility that the baby could have Down's Syndrome. "I cried for three months and prayed for six," she once told me. "And after she was born, I had my tubes tied. Rigo drove me to the hospital, and I didn't care what Victor said. Never, never, would this happen to me again."

I knew all of this and more: That Dolores still kept the battered wood and steel scrub board she had used in a concrete sink in Tijuana, clothes scrubbed so white her hands bled at night. How she knew no English when Victor moved her from Tijuana to America, El Monte, and left her all day as he worked at three auto body shops, kneeling so long at the sides of twisted cars that now his knees are as stiff as rusty door locks; how she walked down the hill two miles to buy groceries, and how she pulled everything, children and groceries, back up; how she whipped Andreas with a brush because he lost the ten dollars that was to last the family two more weeks; how she finally learned to drive the 1945 DeSoto when Catalina was a toddler, and how Victor would not talk to her for a month after he found Dolores' license.

"When I met him, I was twelve . . . almost thirteen. He was so handsome. He could have had any of the girls. But he wanted me. For three years, every Sunday afternoon, I would wait for him in my father's living room, my breath here." She patted her chest, her brown hand between her flat breasts. "My father finally said to me, 'Do you want this man?' And all I could say was 'Yes'."

There is a picture hidden in an empty back bedroom. Victor stands above Dolores, and his young dark curls rest on the side of her head. His left eyebrow, the one closest to her, is slightly arched, almost as if to let her into him completely. The space between them is dark--I cannot see where her hair and his collar begins--but the darkness thins to light on her face. She wears a look I have never seen. Content, her face is smooth, and she smiles, but does not show her teeth. She seems to have just caught something in her dark lips. She's caught what he has brought in. Her eyes are slim almonds. I can almost hear her sigh.

Dolores stopped for a moment and looked at me. I wondered if she saw how different we were; if she knew I could never understand Mexico in the 40's, satined girls and suited boys twirling to Glenn Miller in carefully chaperoned nightclubs. I wondered if she knew I was afraid of her single-minded devotion to one man and of her faith in a God whose teachings led her to bear nine children. I didn't know if she understood she never was a child or that her love for her husband was the same love I felt for many boys in my youth: the anticipation, the disbelief that anyone could possibly love you, that you could be so close to anyone and survive the fire.

As I watched her, I thought about Andreas, wondered if he could have told her I sometimes wanted to leave, mostly at night, when Andreas could not tell me what I wanted to hear, when I remembered our drive down from South Lake Tahoe after our marriage in the Chapel of Love performed by the drunken minister who held my hand and whispered, "You're so attractive." I barely heard our vows, focusing on the semis blaring by on the Interstate. One day later, after our overnight honeymoon at the Swiss Chalet Motel, we fought in the car on the way home after I told Andreas to slow down. What I know now that I didn't know then was that we would always have the same fight. It might start differently--perhaps over disciplining a child or a late bill--but it always wormed its way back to that hot August afternoon. "You're still the same," he cried then and cries now. "You haven't changed at all!"

Twelve years ago, he pulled over on the side of the highway and opened my door so I could drive, blink back tears, think of what to say. When I opened my mouth, Andreas ignored me, watched the road, turned on the Oldies station. I wondered if he thought something would open up in himself on our honeymoon bed where I lay exhausted from the drive and the anxiety of planning a wedding and being married in one day. He had wanted to hold me, to come to some different level of love, but I fell asleep, almost as if it had been me and not the minister who had been drunk. Later, days later, he told me he left the motel room and went to the casinos to gamble.

And on that drive home, Andreas shook his head and sat silent and stayed silent for four days until I started crying because it was so much easier than talking, even though I felt like taking him by the shoulders and shaking him, asking, "What did you want? Who did you want? What are you expecting?"

I did not know if I was lying to Dolores by staying silent myself, watching her marriage unfold before me, unable and unwilling to say, me, too. When I met Andreas, no voice told me yes, yes, but he was the one I wanted, the one I waited for late at night, my hand on my breast. He was the one I opened up for, let him in farther than any one else, let him plant my two sons in my womb like diamonds. How could I tell her that sometimes laying by a warm body was not enough? How could I tell her that I needed him to speak words he could not even whisper to himself? How could I tell her that fires die out or never even start?

Dolores nodded and dropped her eyes again. "A puppy opens his eyes after nine days. I opened mine after forty years," she said. "I asked myself, What have you been doing all these years? For him. Always for him. The children. He named them all. Nothing left for me but middle names." Then she said no more, leaving me to watch her swift hands shred chicken meat. As I followed the movement of her brown fingers, I remembered when she taught me to make tamales, the rhythm of masa, chile, and meat. She held my cupped palm just so to hold the wet husk, helped me plaster the thick corn mixture so the tamale rolled tight and did not drip.

"Ah, tamalera!" she exclaimed as I held up the history of meat and corn, a recipe of mother and daughter that she passed on to me. Her own daughters did not know this story, both first in colleges far from home (educations paid for during the good years, the years when Victor pressed twenties and fifties into our palms as we left for home) then in offices where they wore tailored suits and silk underwear, speaking English at meetings without adding e's to their s's, living their lives far from the grease and heat of their mother's kitchen.

Now I watch Victor sit at the table, listlessly turning the pages of the paper. I remember how he left El Monte two years ago at four in the morning. For months before he finally left, he had been trying to save the auto body shop he managed to open by himself twenty years before. He mortgaged and re-mortgaged the loans, until nothing was left but his empty pockets and his angry sons--all (except Andreas) who worked for him. When he could do nothing more, Victor said goodbye to Dolores as she lay in semi-sleep (when she woke up in the morning she thought his departure was a dream) and drove until he reached the artichoke capitol of California. He rented a room behind a gas station and changed oil for tourists heading to Big Sur. Eventually, he wrote to Andreas and me, telling us where he was but begging us to keep his location a secret from the brothers. He spoke in Spanish to Andreas for many hours, Andreas nodding into the receiver.

"Pa. . . Pero, Pa . . ." Andreas would say, but Victor could not hear anything, especially that since he had left the brothers were fighting, Rigo and Tomas actually beating each other on the greasy shop floor, trying to answer the questions with their fists that they could not answer with their mouths. Who is to pay the bills? How can we do this if our father is not here to show us? Who takes care of Dolores?

When Victor finally left Castroville after two years, tired of tourists and listless in the dull stretch of summer fog, he came to us in Oakland, brought us a juicer, chocolate covered raisins, towels, plastic spatulas, and a second-hand camera. He slept on our couch for two nights--rising at five-thirty each morning as he had for forty-five years--before I told him he had to leave. I watched his grief and knew it was not mine, that it was his and Dolores', that this was our house, and we had enough.

"I have to say this so I won't go crazy," I began, feeling the old man's tears as I sat with him at our table, listening to the smooth silver of my cold words as they entered my mouth like dead fish, knowing he would have taken me in, anytime. "But you cannot stay here. . . You have a house, four bedrooms. Here . . ." I gestured, my arm falling to my lap.

What I could not say was that he had left too many times before, expecting Dolores to accept, to tolerate, to pull herself and the children together like broken pieces of a terra-cotta bowl. I thought of her on her slim bed in Tijuana, alone save for the neighbor woman who went home to wash the bloody sheets; of her aloneness during Mexican summer nights, the sounds of crickets her only company while Victor played cards or slept with another woman; of Dolores stranded on the hill in El Monte with children who needed her attention when she had none to give. How could he stay here and expect us to pick up where she left off? I wanted to talk to him like a parent, to tell him to go home and be a big boy. But I did not know how to do that, so I lied in a way he could believe.

Andreas and I took him to the Greyhound station in San Francisco that afternoon, taking pictures while we waited with the camera we later learned was empty. I remember Victor's thin smiling face, the Bay behind him. I felt his rough hand, black with grease, as he took the camera from me to catch Andreas as he stood away from us and watched the water.

When the bus came, Victor picked up his small bag, no bigger than when he left El Monte, even smaller perhaps, emptied of plans to bring Dolores to Castroville as he had brought her to Tijuana and then to El Monte with life always moving, always coming at them faster than they could breathe in.

Andreas let Victor leave and never hated me for what I said. I don't know why. I don't know what words I was expecting.

I watch Victor now sitting at the dining room table. He looks up abruptly as grease billows from the pan of onions and peppers. Dolores sharpens the knife again, ready to cut tomatoes. I wonder what they say to each other at night, sleeping side by side in the double bed they brought from Mexico. Even though all the other bedrooms are empty, full of pictures and class yearbooks, they hold each other at night, never talking, I suppose, about why Victor left or how he could leave Dolores alone. When he was with Andreas and me in Oakland, he emptied his wallet on the kitchen table and showed me a small picture of Dolores, folded and black on the edges. She is alone in this picture, and Victor rubbed his thumb over her face, finally saying, "My bride. Mi esposa." I did not look at his eyes.

Victor turns the paper, and I see his hands are as worn as Dolores'. Their faces are lined from the same sorrows. They do not speak, and I am caught, like wind in a line hung sheet, in the wonder of their life, of all our lives, of how we stay together and love all those things we cannot say; of how I hold on to the brown skin of my husband, a man who will not talk to me, but who is there in some deeper way, who lives in a language I do not speak.

Victor's paper crackles as she sharpens the knives that will cut the tripe, carnitas, longonisa, and chorizo. I think back to the hidden photograph in the bedroom, and I wonder if Dolores is wrong, if I am wrong. The kitchen now moves to a silence that is both of theirs. It is dark, known, and full like the stillness in their young faces. The strength and the sorrow have always been there. All this feeling, even now, as it simmers and changes and grows thick like the black swirl in the center of chile roja. And I know, even as I watch them now, the paper and knives sharp edges between them, that as Dolores and Victor posed head to cheek, shoulder to stomach, their eyes were open.

I get up from the counter because I am done listening; I have heard enough stories and too much silence, and I want to find my husband. They do not notice as I leave; Dolores faces the range, Victor the wall, and I know I have nothing to do with their story. I leave the heat and chile behind, and as I walk down the hallway of deserted bedrooms, I imagine that when I find Andreas, I will hold his shoulders in my palms and say in a language we both understand "Talk to me. Talk to me now."

Jimmy, is that you?

First published in the Prairie Star, Summer 1999, Volume 1, Issue 1.

When the two men threw my sister over our fence after having used every part of her body, leaving her left arm impaled on the sharp black iron of our gate, no one heard. No one heard the moon, or the last of the summer crickets, or the dog scratching the fleas off his dusty fur. No one heard trash cans or the wheezy beer breath of Mr. Ramirez. No one felt the hair on Vilma Izquierdo's leg stand up when her husband's hand cupped her breast. Somehow, we all slept until morning, a pink flare in a gray sky, and then we finally heard Paloma cry out, "Jimmy, is that you?"

When I first heard her, I thought it was the paper boy, Reynaldo, slinging the news over the gate as he did every morning but Wednesday, the one morning his mother, Antonia Moreno, drove by in her 1968 Buick Sportswagon, throwing the paper like a life she wanted to discard. Maybe, I thought, the thin voice was Reynaldo greeting an early morning reader.

When my mother Dolores heard Paloma's cry, her eyes opened and her ears scanned for emergency, but hearing nothing more than the cry, Jimmy, she softened for a second into the butter brown of my father's bare back and remembered watching old reruns of Superman. My mother sank back into her first days in this country, when she watched the television for clues about American life, watched the man change out of his suit and become a completely different being, powerful, attractive, magic, and strong. She remembered Jimmy Olson, his soft, obsequious smile, his awe of this man who could leap tall buildings in a single bound. For a moment, she herself became Superman, and she knew she was finally flying.

My father, deep in a dream, played in a cantina band with his brother Pablo, who was a hard, dark man with a tattoo of a bear on his neck. Pablo beat a drum and sang Las Mananitas for their mother, Abuelita Lolita. In my father's dream, it was May, in Cuernevaca, and hot Mexican rain beat down on the metal roof like peanuts, keeping perfect rhythm to his brother's drum. My father, Diego, lost himself in the beat of the music, the timpani of the rain, spinning and twirling, red, black, green, and yellow engulfing his ears just like the music, coming out his eyes and fingers. He moved in one spinning ball of color until his only focus was a small rhythm, a moan, really, the voice of my dying sister.

Before we stepped into the quiet morning, our feet bare on the dirt of the front yard, we never would have imagined Paloma hung like meat on a hook, flesh severed and broken, blood dripping down her arms like wax. Both her eyes were black, her nose a mysterious hole in her face. Her smile was wild, crooked, hysterical, but then we saw she wasn't smiling at all, that her mouth was torn into an unnatural grimace, an anger and sorrow so deep we could not miss it.

Paloma cried out, "Jimmy, is that you?" even as my mother, bent and moaning on the ground, stroked Paloma's dirt streaked hair, even as my father ran into the house to call 911. Who is Jimmy, I wondered blankly, holding Paloma's foot, still strapped neatly into my mother's gold pump. "Oh, Jimmy," she said. "Jimmy, is that you?'

When the paramedics came, they cut the gate post off rather than pull it out of her arm. She fell to the ground, and they worked on her, but my golden sister died before we remembered who Jimmy was.

My sister never liked me, so I could only watch her life like some brilliant, foreign movie. I, shorter, darker, quiet from the day of birth, needed only to be the audience to her songs and the admirer of her sandstone skin. When she was eleven and I was eight, she took to wearing my mother's old dresses, the ones my mother bought to go to El Sereno High's proms, her first dances in the United States. Paloma sifted by, taffeta and silk, feet high arched in slingbacks with sequins. "I am a dancer," she said, moving her arms like tan swans around her head. "You will never be a dancer. Your body isn't right," she said, looping past me. "You wait and see, I will dance in New York on the stage." Glum and brown, I sat in the corner, eating churros thick with cinnamon and sugar, clutching onto her hem whenever she twirled by.

A year later, she hung onto the toilet rim, staring down into the redswirl water. "I am a woman," she said to me. I sat on the edge of the bathtub, holding on, too, trying to not fall backwards, trying, I think, to hold her up. But Paloma was not falling. She was slapping the thick napkin in her underwear as if she had long ago memorized the curious diagrams in the Maxipad box my mother hid in the bottom drawer of the cabinet.

"Does it hurt?" I asked, having seen the burgundy splotches on her underwear, blood that looked like it came from something important: a kidney, a liver, a mysterious tunnel of intestine. "Of course not," she said. "Don't you know we all get it. It happens to us all."

And then, her wildness was magic, her breasts emerging like blessings, her hips swinging to the swish swish beat in her head. Maybe, because her hair curled down her back like honeysuckle vines, her legs grew long, and her teeth shone like a private invitation, my parents ignored the silent afternoons when Paloma locked herself in our dark room, the days she refused to eat or put on clean clothes.

"Paloma," I would whisper by our door, my cheek pressed on the redwood, the echo of silence in my ear. "Come out before Mami and Papi come home. I want to see you . . . I want to see you dance."

Sometimes, she would open the door, her hair snarled, her nightgown rich with sweat and nightmares. Once she stared at me for a long time, finally sighing and asking, "How long have I been gone?" Other times, I would fall asleep to the smell of wood stain against my face, my knees bruised from kneeling under the doorknob for an entire afternoon.

When Paloma was fifteen, my parents threw her a quincenera. All our neighbors, friends, and relatives in this country came. My father cleared away the furniture on the hardwood floor of the living room and his friends, Olivero from Argentina, Enrique from Puerto Rico, and Sofia from Tijuana would dance, eventually bringing us all to the floor, the colors and music mixing, a swirl of salsa, samba, and tango.

Later, after the toasts and presents and congratulations, Paloma danced. She raised her hand over her head, her fingers splayed like resting butterflies. And then the music started, guitar, violin, deep and sorrowful male voices, Paloma's hips, knees, and ankles moving to each beat, each note, each twang of string. Perhaps she was tentative at first, pretending to be shy in front of the crowd, but then she stomped to the rhythm of the hired mariachis, her red and blue skirt flipping, the adults moving back slowly, surrounding her in a circle. She danced for all of us, someone we would watch even if we had never met her, someone whose blonde hair and green eyes would stop us on the street, her voice and body keeping us there.

Then one morning after searching the house, Mami and I found her in the dirt of the backyard, her bare feet leading her in circles. She looked toward us but kept moving, crying out, "No, no, no. Not yet. No, no, no. Not yet." At first, my mother and I sat on the stone wall by the patio, waiting, we thought, for a gesture: Her hand flinging up above her head, poised for the music to begin, or her neck, arching back, chin thrust to the light, her mouth a practiced smile.

When nothing happened -- my sister, unseeing, unsmiling, body stiff and mechanical, turned to an empty music we couldn't hear -- my mother began to pray. And when God forgot to hear her words and Paloma struggled out of her nightgown and threw it at her feet, my mother stood up, her fist at her throat as if she were trying to hold back her breath, almost refusing to breathe in the new moment of a different Paloma. I stayed back, watching my sister, mi hermana bonita. I watched her spin and spin, wondering if what was happening to her brain was something that would happen to me, too, just like our woman parts had opened in order, the older first.

The day after we found her crying and twirling in the yard, my mother, Paloma, and I left my father at home and drove to the town my mother grew up in, Cruz Blanca, a dot just north of Acapulco. My father sat silently at the kitchen table as we lurched away in Antonia Moreno's Sportswagon, my mother holding the steering wheel with one hand, Paloma's flailing arms with the other. I sat in the third seat, as far away as I could, as far as I could get from Paloma's whimpers, and stared at the road trailing behind us like newspaper, watching Los Angeles fade into tan, the smog of Riverside a dirty eyebrow on the horizon.

"Yanira will help her," my mother said tightly, her mouth a slit of fear. "If anyone can help her, it is Yanira. Dios mio. You know, she saved me when I was born." And to calm herself, my mother again told me the story of her birth, born blue and still, and how Yanira breathed life into her baby lungs, working and breathing until my mother was pink and crying. "She gave your abuela special teas to help her pain. If it weren't for her, we would both be dead."

In Cruz Blanca, my mother and Paloma huddled in Yanira's one room house, away from the heat that radiated like voltage off the smooth beige boulders. I sat under a coconut palm, watching the door.

"Luz, come inside . . . Come in, mija," my mother said before they closed the door, but I had heard enough, had listened too long to my sister's mutterings and sudden screams, had learned too much about Paloma's fears--that if she stopped moving she might disappear or, worse, that if she turned a corner too sharply, she might run into herself, and then another, Palomas coming at her from all sides. Before I backed away, I stared into Yanira's unlined face.

"Can you help her? " I asked. "Can you make her like she was? Did you know she is a dancer? Did you know she is a woman?"

Yanira spoke to me in a thick Indian dialect that sounded like twigs breaking. I have always wondered what she said, wondered if those words were part of the cure or, instead, a warning no one was ready to hear.

The three of them were in the house all day. As I sat, kicking dust at scorpions and red ants, I imagined the herbed smoke, Yanira's crackling words, my mother's constant wails, and Paloma's deadened face and sad, wild eyes. Finally, at dusk, I moved from the shade of the palm to the window, listening in, hearing chants, smelling the dank odor of a wet fire. "Ayyyy . . .," I heard my mother yell. "Dios mio."

We stayed for a week in the home of my Tia Flor. Paloma slept almost all day, every day, and my mother pronounced her cured. "It was like magic," she said. "I saw it come out of her with the smoke. It was evil. Totally evil. Paloma is just as she was."

Our relatives nodded, knowing the strong power of the curandería of Yanira Gonzalez. And when we brought Paloma home, quiet, shining, something beatific in her face, my father wept. "I should have never doubted," he said. "Oh, you are back."

I looked at Paloma carefully, felt the tight high corners of her quiet smile in my heart.

The day after we found Paloma naked on the beach in Santa Monica, I went with my mother to the county hospital. Our neighbor, Mr. Ramirez, had called us at three in the morning.

"Excuse me, Señora. But I think your daughter, the, uh . . . Paloma. She got on the bus. I saw her when I came home from work. She did not look. . . right. Maybe like the last time?"

"Call the police," my father said, even as my mother stuffed her purse full of Kleenex and rosaries. "Let them pick her up. They'll take her to the right place."

My mother snapped her purse shut and pulled maps from the shelf below the telephone. "I can't let them find her, mi Palomita. Mi chica. Ay, pobracita."

We followed the map's black and red lines from El Sereno to Santa Monica, a crowded city on the Pacific Ocean. From five until seven, we drove up and down the Pacific Coast Highway, looking for Paloma, my mother fingering a rosary in her right hand as she drove. When we finally found her, naked and slumped against a light pole, she was talking to a friend she had met, a man we could not see, but one whose mother used to give him two plates at dinner time. "Two full plates," Paloma said. "Always two full plates. She never would have treated him like this. He gets nothing now. And he deserves better. Oh, yes. Oh, yes. He needs to get what he deserves. Don't bother me. I'm talking to Jimmy."

"Who, Palomita," my mother said, pulling Paloma to the car. "What plates, mi corazon? What are you saying?"

I followed them, holding my mother's purse, sitting behind Paloma on the way home, holding her arms still as she tried to take off her clothes again. "Don't be surprised if you see me . . . No, no, no. I won't say that. I can't do that. No, no, no."

My mother never drove on the freeway, so the car ride home took forever, Paloma throwing clothes, screaming for full plates, looking excitedly out the window for other Palomas, licking her fingers and smoothing her eyebrows over and over again. I looked to my mother for a prayer, almost saying myself, Dios mio, ayudame, ayuda mi hermana, but my mother was silent, her eyes on the road, her body just slightly turned away from Paloma and the ocean, our car headed back toward the hills.

At home, when Paloma finally fell asleep, her hands still moving, seeming to serve up full dishes of mole con pollo, chile verde, and carne asada, my mother leaned back deeply into her chair, seeming to want to fold herself between the thin pine dowels. My father was at the kitchen table drinking a Heineken, his eyes and fingers trying to search for something sane, and finding nothing, he was still.

My name means light, but I have always been dark. Paloma had always been the bright one, the one moving to inner music, teasing us all into believing that life was a place we wanted to be.

One night, I heard her moving in her bed, moaning softly. I turned toward her figure, and saw her rhythmic swaying, heard her breathing hard and deep. I felt something opening up inside me, but I didn't know what it was, something wet and unknown, salty and yearning. I listened to her rustling, the rhythm of her hand under her covers, and when she sighed, I melted into the pillow, aching to discover what I had missed. Every night, until the time we found her on the beach, I listened for her movements, her breaths, and she showed me what to do, and my hand moved to the warm spot between my legs. I fingered my almost hairless self, and felt what Paloma felt, and we moved together to the beat, this pulsing, this something we could share because we never talked about it.

I couldn't tell the county doctor about how she had taught me this thing, this important thing when he asked about her past.

"Has she always acted out?" he said to my mother in English. I looked at her and translated, "Siempre ha hecho cosas locas?"

My mother searched my eyes for the answer. Acted out? Claro que si! That's why we loved Paloma, her dancing, her golden hair, tan thighs, her prom dresses. Every meal was a show, with Paloma directing each movement, the conversation.

"No, doctor. No acting out," my mother said.

After her first hospital stay, Paloma came home full of drugs, and death, half of herself left somewhere at the hospital, maybe that half was still with Jimmy, the man who wanted the big meals his mother served him. Her green eyes reflected nothing, and her breath smelled like ceviche left for days in the refrigerator. After weeks of watching her list through the house in her pink nightgown, one arm dragging almost as if she were carrying something heavy, we all slowly began to circle in, taking on pieces of her, the pieces we could find.

My mother bought a red dress, silk and gold trim, and swirled around the room before Mr. Ramirez's niece's quinceñera. My father read to us from the paper with feeling, the deaths, robberies, births, murders, and business mergers suddenly like tiny movies in front of our eyes.

And as the months and then the years went by, my thick baby body turned slim with long bone and smooth muscle. My beauty began to stop men on the street, and I ignored my mother's frown as they looked, her hand on my sleeve as she led me away. I grew my hair down to my waist, the long brown ends turning blonde from the sun. And even now, I still look like Paloma on the outside, no longer brown and thick, but light and slim and free.

At night, as Paloma breathed deeply in a drug dream, I started to move to the old music she taught me, that night time sound that brought out something of Paloma in me, a voice of my own I could never hear enough of.

Mornings would bring my sister's voice and the loud honk of a car as it slid away from our house, trailing dust and sorrow. When I went outside to find Paloma, she would laugh and then fall to the ground, her eyes as dull as Jefferson nickels. After I would wash her, cleaning lipstick from her face and the mess of men from her thighs, I would discover her full pill bottles in the bathroom trash, the name of the nice county doctor on the label.

Once, after my father found her with a man in a parked car outside the local cantina and brought her home screaming, she grabbed my arm as my father tried to wrestle her to our room and pulled me with her down to the floor. Paloma was silent now, her eyes the same green as the night she danced for us on her quincienera.

"Paloma, let her go. Let Luz go," my father said, trying to lift her up and take her to bed.

She gripped tighter, her nails like animal teeth in my skin. I said nothing. She leaned back, her hair smelling of tequila and vomit, whispered, "What will happen next?" and then dropped my arm. The circle she left on my skin was first white, then red, the next day purple, eventually the yellow and green disappearing, though I could still feel her sadness as she dug in, hunting for bone. Even now, I rub the area between my elbow and wrist, knowing that somewhere there has to be a scar.

We lived like this for four years. Some days, back on the medication, she was fine, painting her nails flamingo pink, looking at me piercingly. "It's not like I'm gone," she said. "I know what is happening." Fat slowly filled in her curves, her lovely breasts engulfed by stomach. Other days, she would put on a prom dress, squeeze into it like a hand into a wet rubber glove.

"Put on Yo se que volveras, Luz. I'll dance for you," and she was like a wild red bowling pin twirling around the living room. My mother would stop cooking, and she'd lean on me by the doorway.

"Mi corozon. Mi nina bonita," my mother would sigh, looking at Paloma and holding my hand.

I can tell you how my mother's face aged with sadness and worry as she watched Paloma leave us, cell by cell, even as her body grew bigger. I can tell you how my father drank more and talked less, how he drove his car at night searching for my sister in every parked Maverick and crowded cantina; how we would drive her to one mental hospital and then another, and how he would go to pick her up the next day, later drinking on the couch as she crooned love songs to her feet.

I can tell you all this and she will still be hanging on the fence one summer morning, a stiff metal gate post in her arm, her face ripped open as easily as plastic wrap. Paloma will still be wishing for Jimmy, even as the paramedics pump air into her lungs, push on her flabby chest, and hurl their life force into a body that can't take one more second of nada.

And I think of the one minute she and I had alone, after my mother, her daughter's blood on her cheek, followed my father into the house. Once he said the words My daughter . . . terrible emergency . . . hurry, please to the English-speaking operator, he hung up the phone and turned, kissing my mother, holding her body like porcelain, knowing he had to move slowly back to the time before Paloma. He placed his body, now older, softer, and more afraid against hers, remembering the nights of their honeymoon in Rosarito Beach, the black ocean that pushed crabs, sand dollars, and seagull feathers to the door of their small cabin. My mother was so tired now. She lay her cheek on my father's shoulder, rubbing their daughter's blood on his shirt. My mother sighed, breathing in salty skin, wet sheets, sea foam.

Outside, I held my sister's face in my palms, waited for her eyes to open. I wanted her to see me and remember that I was the one who had been watching. I almost shook her, and she stirred, her eyes flickering, then opening, two emerald bowls holding my face clearly.

"Jimmy will come this time. It's time to go."

Paloma never said another word to me. The paramedics came, and I backed away, seeing everything clearly, too: My mother, my father, the rest of my life without her, flat and brown, rising from the Los Angeles basin with the force of my sister's soul.

This Time, Yes

First published in The West Wind Review, 18th Anthology, 1999.

On the way to the dentist, Mary is telling her son, Michael, a story about King Solomon. Michael says, "Uh, huh," at all the right places, but Mary wonders if he understands the point, the very clear point, when the Craftsman's wife says to King Solomon, "In this basket you see many colored eggs: red, blue, yellow, purple. Yet under the shell, all are the same. This is how it is with women."

Michael doesn't know that this is an audacious thing to say to a man with 700 wives and 300 concubines. But this isn't why Mary is telling the story.

"So, you see. She knew. Sex isn't like . . . a box of chocolates . . . "

"Yeah, yeah, yeah."

"Really, Michael. I know you want to crack those eggs now, but you get the same thing each time."

Mary knows that the myth was told to keep sexual impulses repressed, and she knows that one beautiful person is not just like another, but fourteen-year-old Michael has told her he has bought some condoms, wants to have sex with Deezy, his newest girlfriend, and won't be ordered around.

"It's my life," he says.

"Yes. No. Of course. But you're only fourteen. You can't drive, you can't drink, you can't vote."

"I can drink."

Mary can't talk any more; instead, she focuses on the 580 freeway, whizzes by cars, all her fear riding in front of her as if it were on the hood with the Dodge symbol.

Finally, she sighs, saying, "Sex is really great. And I know why you want to do it. But some things can wait. Some things get better. Sometimes, your head has to catch up to your body before you can really enjoy life."

Michael looks at his mother, says, "Eggs. Hmmm . . . " Then he stops talking, watches clouds, thinks of Deezy, leaves his mother to feel her hands on the wheel taking them places.

At the dentist, Mary sits next to a man in a smart jacket of some kind, maybe white and green plaid, black bow tie, and crisp ironed black pants. His two-year-old hangs on his arm, and Mary watches him fill out the information sheet, gold rings flashing under the dentist's fluorescent lights. Mary has a problem with left and right, so she struggles to determine if he is wearing a wedding ring. She wonders if he notices she doesn't. She smiles at him, he smiles back, they comment on the waiting room, the large aquarium, the problems with flossing, the latest cover of People magazine.

Later, they are both waiting to talk to the dentist's mother, a retired schoolteacher who lords over the books, her cheeks sagging just below her jaw line.

Mary looks over at the man. "I feel like I'm waiting for the principal."

When the man smiles back, so-white teeth against his burnt-butter skin, one fine scar over his left eyebrow, she thinks of eggs, colored eggs, some with surprises under the shell.

That night, Mary has a dream about a woman at work she hates. Or, maybe it is this woman, Kathy, who hates Mary; but in any case, somehow, they sized each other up early on and avoid each other during faculty meetings, yearly Christmas parties, and occasional surprise encounters at the grocery store, passing by politely when necessary, mouthing quick, meaningless "Hi's." They move their heads swiftly to the empty side, letting each other's whole bodies pass without breathing. But in this dream, Kathy is teaching Mary to make love to a woman. At first, Mary decides that she isn't really going to get involved with this lovemaking, willing to let Kathy do everything, but the next thing Mary knows, she is on her knees, bending over Kathy asking, "Is this right? What do I do now?" Kathy tells her what to do, and Mary rubs Kathy's breast, puts her fingers in the warm hair of her crotch, moves her lips down, breathes in all of Kathy's smells.

She wakes up on a full inhale, her body full of buzz, electric, her head full of the dark room, the hum of the clock, the sounds of her cat, curling and curling into a nest on the chair.

On the front of the note is a squiggly, curly Michael, some doodled flowers, an acronym L.Y.M.T.W.C.S--Love ya more than words can say--and a caveat: Do NOT let anyone read this note. Mary reads this message, flips the rectangled note in her hands, passes it between each palm. Portents of Michael's future therapy visits flash through her mind like captions on an Oprah show--Mother betrays son's confidence by reading his notes. Mother invades son's room and digs through backpack to see what is going on in his life. Very bad mother loses all morality while reading the personal, private notes of her son.

She catches a paper edge with her fingernail, peels open the note, and reads:

Whuz Up--

Mary's heart has floated into her head, both now empty. She wonders if she is still standing and forces herself to breathe, look down, see her Doc Martens planted on the hard wood. She reads the lines, I want to fuck you, too and Are you going to finger me? over and over again. She reads them until she folds the note and places it back in Michael's backpack, careful to zip it up, just so.

Mary wonders what her ex-husband would say about Michael. She imagines a conspiratorial pat on the back, some kind of ritual male-bonding high-five, but even as she thinks this, she knows this is a fantasy of hers, something about the secret world of men she imagines exists, a world with intricate hand shakes, tremendous world secrets in breast pockets, and a handbook detailing how to have sex without suffering, without a conscience. But she wonders if Michael needs some kind of male talk, important information about what penises do and how to use them correctly, a father's discussion of technique rather than a mother's diatribe on condoms.

But Michael's father, David, is in a different state with a different woman and a new family, a man with diapers and mortgages on his mind, a man unable to see that his oldest child is almost as old as he was when he met Mary, a man who sent Michael a Lego kit for his last birthday.

"David," she said to him on the phone after a puzzled Michael had gone to sleep. "He's fourteen, for Christ's sake. He hasn't played with Legos for two years. In fact, I gave them all away to the neighbor kids."

David sighed. "I'm sorry. Can I talk to him?"

"He's asleep."

"Well . . . "

"Well?"

"What do you want Mary? Really? What do you want me to say this time?"

Mary felt a hundred answers shoot to her mouth like bullets, but she said nothing. She just listened to David's breathing, holding three Legos in her palm like broken glass.

Mary has never met Deezy, only heard her airy, "Is Mike there?" on the phone, or the longer, "This is Deezy. Tell Mike to call me," on the answering machine, the girl's words rammed so close together that Deezy and tell swirl into one two-syllable word, Deeztel. Mary has seen her picture, 8th grade mug shots with aqua backing, a girl with limp blonde hair and berry lips, careful blue lines rimming her eyes. She decides she'd rather Michael go out with a girl in another picture, one with a thick swag of brown hair and clear butter-brickle eyes. She stares into this picture, looks at the eyes, and can only find mascara, just a little, on her lashes.

"Who is this? Who are all these girls?" she asks Michael.

"Get out of my room," he says. "Who?"

"This one. This one with brown hair."

Michael walks in his room, past the Kurt Cobain and angled skater posters pictures on his wall. "That's Tyler. We're just friends. Now, get out of my room."

"Are there any more pictures?" Mary asks.

"No," Michael says, closing the door.

In seventh grade, Mary, her friend Bonnie, and two boys, Matt and Craig, meet at the Orinda theatre on a double date. It is disaster week, and there is a double-feature with a rerelease of the Poseidon Adventure and a new movie, Towering Inferno. Just after the cruise liner capsized, Matt sticks his tongue in Mary's mouth. Mary tries to relax, but all she can think is that she is holding a long, insistent slug on her tongue, its slimy juice running up and over her lips and down her chin.

During intermission, Bonnie and she excuse themselves and run into the bathroom, throwing themselves on the art deco sofas.

"Oh my god. It's so gross!" they laugh, muffling mock barfs behind cupped palms.

"I feel like my face has been licked clean by a cat," says Bonnie, rubbing her lips.

"Yeah. But more like, like a slug," says Mary, pulling open the bathroom door and walking with Bonnie back to their seats, the boys, and two more hours of kissing.

From then on, even when they start to like the kissing, and even later, much later, after they are married, they will raise eyebrows, and whisper slug, just to make each other laugh.

"Michael, you've got to wash your face. If you wash your face, you won't break out as much."

"Leave me alone."

"Think about Deezy. Wouldn't you like her to see your clean face?"

"No."

"Mike, really."

Michael looks at Mary. "What do you wash your face with?" he asks.

"Come here. I got all this stuff when I had my facial."

Michael gets off the couch and walks into the bathroom. "How do you do it?"

"Let me do it this first time, then you can do it yourself. Okay?"

Michael sits down on the toilet seat and lets Mary wrap a hot towel over his face. "You've got to do this every day. Believe me, it'll look a lot better soon." She hears his muffled uh-huh, then takes off the towel. As she smoothes on the cleansing lotion, she again sees his mustache and beard, not a really full beard, but thick wiry man hairs, all the same.

After she is done putting on toning lotion and moisturizer, Michael stands up and looks in the mirror, looks at himself for a long time, looking at himself as he wants Deezy to see him.

"Wow . . . will you do this every night, Mom?" he asks. "I can't do it as good. Please?"

Mary nods, looks into her own face, wonders who would want to look at her, whom she wants to look.

The next day, when she gets home from work, there is a message on the machine from the man she met at the dentist the week before. She listens to it twice before she really understands: Hi, my name is Damon Latrell. We met at Dr. Cass-Walker's last Wednesday. We were sitting together waiting to talk to Mrs. Cass? I got the receptionist to give me your number. Anyway, this probably sounds weird or is inappropriate or something, but I would like to get together with you. Maybe lunch? If this is too weird, I understand. Call me . . .

Mary remembers him immediately, envisions his skin, the scar, his fingers, trying to fit marriage on one of them, but she thinks, it wasn't a wedding ring, it was pinkie, no, a left hand, maybe an index finger. She writes his name and number down on a pad.

Mary finally meets Deezy the night of the eighth grade Winter Ball. She and Michael went to Tux-For-All early in the week and rented a black tuxedo for the night. As she stood side-by-side with him in the dressing room mirror adjusting his jacket, she realized that he had long ago passed her in height.

"It looks good, Mike."

Michael stared at himself, turning side to side. "I need one of those things. Those belts."

"A cummerbund. . . What color is Deezy's dress?"

"Red. Real red. She bought it last weekend."

"Okay. That'll look real good. Red and black. I'll go tell the man, okay?"

Michael smiled, and Mary caught something thick in her throat that had fallen from her eyes and come up from her heart. She wanted to shore up the minutes and hours of her life with Michael, all the time before this last five minutes in the dressing room and hold them in her body, savor them like a favorite flavor, lemon, toffee, peppermint. She wanted to pull Michael to her body and bring him back, for one second, to a body that wanted hers, an infant, dependent on her for everything, for her milk, something she made for him that he took.

But she turned, let him smile at himself in the mirror, went to get the salesclerk who would match Michael's outfit perfectly with his girlfriend's, with Deezy's real red dress.

The night of the ball, Deezy's parents come to pick up Michael, and the three of them walk to the front door, two coated parents behind a thin girl, her arms bare, two spaghetti straps holding her body to her dress. Mary thinks she looks different than her picture, less like the other girls in Michael's collection, more like someone to wear a tuxedo for.

Mary shakes the parents' hands, then Deezy's, and says, "I can't believe they are old enough to go to a ball. But they both look wonderful."

Deezy's mother Ann nods her head. "I know what you mean. Well, we better get them there. Deezy, I told you to wear a coat!"

But Deezy isn't listening to her mother; she is staring at Michael, a man in his tuxedo, red cummerbund, black, patent leather shoes.

"Wait," Deezy says, and turns to her father who has been holding a plastic container. She takes it from him and pulls out a red carnation boutonniere, pinning it carefully on Michael's lapel. Michael looks down at Deezy's thin fingers, his face red and clear.

"Okay, let's go," says Deezy's father.

"Have fun!" says Mary, watching them get in the car, and drive away until the tail lights are as far away as two red stars.

While she waits for Michael and Deezy to call her to pick them up, Mary decides to grade a stack of papers, lining up pens, pencils, and a stapler on the coffee table, but, instead, she ends up watching a string of sitcoms and reading a New Yorker. She looks at a part of a show, then reads a paragraph, her head bobbing up at news flashes, down during commercials. Every twenty minutes or so, she walks to the refrigerator, looks in, then closes the door. She opens the cupboards, finds nothing but a box of stale reduced-fat Wheat Thins, leftover French bread, and half a bottle of rice vinegar, and walks back to the living room. Finally, she spots the pad on which she wrote Damon's name and number and picks it up. She tries to reconstruct how she felt about his call by examining her handwriting. Her a's are wide and loopy, so she thinks that the idea of calling him excited her even then. She wonders why she is scared to call him, when she has given herself in small and big ways to men who never bothered to call her before or after a date.

Mary sits on the couch, picks up the phone, and dials. She listens to the ringing, imagines what his voice will sound like when he says hello.

During her junior year in high school, Mary goes out with a boy named Jim. After three months of careful dates, dinners, movies, dances, and hikes, she finds herself Friday night after Friday night in Jim's stationwagon, his penis hovering over her, she thinks, like some kind of wild marsupial, ready to reenter the womb. Her jeans are down at her ankles, her socks and shoes still on. Jim's penis pokes through his boxers and then waits. He asks, night after night, "Can I put it in."

Mary listens to his breathing, feels his body hot and brown, holds her hand around his penis, the first she's ever touched, this new smooth animal she pets and squeezes to keep alive. Later, she will wonder how it feels to have an erection for two hours, but then, every Friday night, she answers, "No."

After Jim has broken up with her and much later, after she has finally given away her virginity to a boy she meets at a party and decides--the eve of her high school graduation--to fuck, she wishes she could go back to the slow hot nights in the stationwagon, with a boy who dated her and loved her for a time, who was different than so many of the boys she would meet later, and say, now, this time, "Yes."

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