A Private Sorcery (38 page)

The salt stings Rena's lips, and she feels the tequila going straight to
her head. Prankle puts an arm around her and then starts kissing her hair. She thinks about the brown incisor, about not being able to look Leonard in the eye, and unwraps his arm.

“I'll make you dinner. My famous mole sauce. You can stretch out on the couch and watch a video. My brother sends me
Saturday Night Live
without the commercials.”

He'd planned it out. The visit to El Hoyo, then to bed. What a degraded idea of foreplay, she thinks, showing me children living in rubble. But she holds back a caustic comment because she suddenly feels nervous. Nervous because he seems to know everyone.

“I'll have to take a rain check. I signed on again to baby-sit.”

Prankle runs a finger down her arm. She removes his hand and edges a few inches away on the banquette.

“I hope your friend's little bundle of joy is legit.”

“What do you mean?”

“Baby parts brokers. It's big business here—stealing or buying babies and then selling their body parts. It's all mixed up with the adoption racket. The mothers think the babies are going to rich families from Philadelphia. Or the brokers get a baby and it's not healthy, so they turn it over to a lawyer for adoption.” Prankle licks the edge of his glass, his tongue red from the salt. “There's big bucks in it, especially in India and Kuwait. For a male heir, some of those princes will pay a couple hundred K for a baby's liver.”

“They kill the children for organs?”

“Depends on the part. Sometimes they sew them up and send them back.”

She pushes her drink away, queasy and clammy all at once.

“The brokers, they're like ambulance chasers. They comb the Highland villages for pregnant girls. Seventeen-year-olds with two babies and another on the way and not enough food for even themselves. For two hundred quetzals, some of these girls will agree to give up a child at birth. Of course, they think it's for adoption. I've seen girls who were shown, no joke, pictures cut out of a magazine. One of those ads with the family who bought the Dodge minivan or the Mass Mutual Life Insurance.
Fucking newsprint right on the back. Here, in the city, half the time the mother never even sees the money. The baby is stolen by a brother or uncle who handles the deal.”

She excuses herself. In the back of her throat, she can taste the morning's bitter coffee. Doubled over the toilet, she heaves, an awful sound like the earth quaking.

Afterwards, she splashes water on her cheeks and rinses out her mouth. A woman in a starched apron hands her a paper towel. The woman holds up a finger. “
Un momentito.
” She lifts a folding chair out of the supply closet, motioning for Rena to sit. Rena lowers herself into the chair and closes her eyes. She feels the woman placing a cool towel on her forehead.

“
Bebé?
”

“What?”

“
Bebé?
” The woman arches her back so her middle sticks out. She pats her stomach.

“No. No.”

The woman smiles as though in disbelief. Rena wills herself not to cry.

“No, no baby.”

Returning to the table, she leans over Prankle. She touches his shoulder. Next to him is an empty shot glass. She whispers into his ear: “
La turista
, you'll have to excuse me.”

He starts to rise.

“You stay. Please.”

“I'll drive you.”

“No. Really. It will make me feel worse to ruin your night as well.” The cocktail waitress arrives with another shot. Prankle looks over at the bartender, giving him a mock salute. “I'll get you a cab.”

Rena places a hand over her stomach. “I'm just going to run. The concierge—it's already arranged.” She takes her sweater from the banquette. Kiss him on the cheek, she thinks. One kiss and you're free. She brushes her lips on his scratchy skin and turns.

A
T FOUR, SHE AWAKENS
to a baby's cries. The high-pitched relentless cries she remembers from Gene, who'd had colic his first three months. A night when Joe was on the road and her mother shook her awake: “I can't take the sound. I'm afraid I'm going to put his head in the toilet.” From her mother's room, Gene's two-week-old shrieks. The kitchen door banging as her mother ran out into the street. Bending over the crib, she found Gene red and blotchy from screaming. His skin hot. She held him firmly against her breastbone the way the neighbor had shown her. For an hour, she walked him through the house, bouncing him up and down, singing over his cries. Slowly his breathing calmed and the cries turned to whimpers. She laid him back in his crib and slept on the floor beside him.

After that, she'd not gone back to school. Her boyfriend Rusty would visit, and if the baby was sleeping and Eleanor was sufficiently alert, they'd drive to Stinson Beach, where she'd watch while he joined the other low-tide surfers. With Gene's birth, she'd lost all interest in learning more about what she privately called
this sex thing
. She was just tired, she told Rusty. Things would change when Gene started sleeping through the night. Or perhaps, she'd thought but not said, it was sadness at losing the little piece of her mother she'd still had before Gene's birth—afternoons when Eleanor would set a stack of forty-fives on the record changer and they'd dance together to the Beach Boys and Herman's Hermits, nights when Joe would be gone on an overnight haul and they would bring snacks into bed and watch
Green Acres
and
I Dream of Jeannie
.

Her second week home, she left a message with the school secretary that she had pneumonia and would be out for a while. When a concerned teacher called, she coughed into the receiver and said she was still pretty sick. As time passed, it became clear that her mother had erased the thought of Rena ever returning to school. In Eleanor's mind, she and Rena were the caretakers of the baby. It was only natural that Rena would be home with her, changing diapers and sterilizing bottles.

In a way, Rena didn't mind. The classes were boring, mostly busywork; she could easily keep up by reading the textbooks and doing the
homework. As for the rest, the intrigues of the cliques and romances played out in the parking lot, bathrooms and cafeteria, her goal had always been simply to avoid notice or humiliation—to get by in whatever clothes she could pull together without drawing attention to her too-big breasts or lack of money. She'd been grateful to have a best friend, Cheryl, amazed when Rusty had picked her out of study hall.

In the end, it was an accident that intervened: Joe forgetting his wallet one morning and returning to find Eleanor in bed and Rena at the kitchen sink giving Gene a bath. “What the hell is going on here?” he yelled as he yanked Eleanor to her feet and grabbed Gene from the sink, all of which led to his taking Eleanor to the mental health clinic, where they began an antidepressant and arranged for a home aide to come weekdays.

Back at school, no one would catch her eye. Finally, a tearful Cheryl broke it to her that Rusty had been seen
more than once
driving MaryAnn home. To Rena, it made perfect sense. She'd wanted to say to him, it's fine, you can have sex with her, just keep taking me with you to the ocean. Keep letting me watch you cut the curves as you wend down to Stinson Beach. Keep grinning at me as you turn to hoist your board onto your shoulder and walk into the sea. Instead, she wrote him a note on lined paper torn from her history notebook: “It seems that things have changed. I'd appreciate your not calling me anymore.”

By Easter, Eleanor had adjusted sufficiently to the antidepressant to completely take over caring for Gene. She'd gained some weight, but it seemed a small price to pay for the great improvement in her mood. By fall, she'd ballooned to one hundred seventy pounds and her skin had erupted in blemishes. Joe took to making nasty comments about Eleanor's appearance and once, drunk on beer, overturned a bag of cheese twists on her head.

S
HE WAKES TO THE
manager knocking on her door. When Leonard was here, the manager had seemed not to understand English, but he now speaks in a surprisingly clear British accent: “There is a Señor Prankle on the telephone.”

“Please ask him to leave a phone number where I can call him back.”

In the shower, Rena fantasizes about having Prankle talk with Sonia and Hank. They will listen to him. They will nod their heads sympathetically. Yes, they've heard about these things, but in their case they have used a lawyer of impeccable reputation who insisted they meet personally with the birth mother. Sonia will pull out pictures of the birth mother holding the baby, pictures they will save to show Carlos when he is old enough to understand.

Rena sits in the courtyard with a packet of postcards. She does not say to herself I am waiting for Sonia, though when Sonia's door swings open and Sonia wrapped in her yellow robe rushes barefoot out to the courtyard with Carlos on her shoulder, she realizes that this is what she has been doing.

“Can you hold him while I get a bottle?”

Rena reaches for the crying baby. She rocks him to distract him from his hunger pangs. Outside, she can hear the morning traffic, the screech of brakes, horns honking, as the day's commerce begins.

Sonia gives Rena the warmed bottle and goes to get a second chair. Rena rests the baby's head in the crook of her arm and brings the nipple to his mouth. He closes his eyes as he sucks, little gasping sounds.

“I can take him,” Sonia says once she's settled in the chair.

“That's okay. I don't mind.”

Sonia stretches out her freckled legs and folds her arms over her chest. “Each time, it's as if he's never been fed before.” Her chin tips up as she looks at the sky. “Have you ever seen such a hideous sky? Like a stained tablecloth.”

They sit quietly, Sonia staring up at the sky, Rena's heart beating too fast. When Carlos stops sucking, Rena slides the nipple from his mouth and lifts him onto her shoulder. Immediately, he burps.

Sonia laughs. “Yes, coo-coo. My little barbarian.” She kisses the bottom of Carlos' foot.

Rena moves Carlos back into her arms. Sated, he sucks languorously, enjoying the warm liquid on his tongue.

“Did you get to meet the birth mother?” she asks. The question
sounds abrupt even to her own ears.

Sonia peers at her. “No. She was from a tiny village somewhere in the Highlands. She'd never been to the city. The lawyer and his wife brought the baby to us.”

Rena thinks about Prankle's stories of babies sold by greedy uncles for the few hundred quetzals an adoption lawyer will pay. Of illiterate girls escorted to hospitals to have their babies and then handed forms to sign that they learn only later are adoption consents.

“But you have her name? If you ever wanted to contact her?”

A startled expression passes over Sonia's face. “Wait a minute. Where are you coming from?”

Sonia stands. She reaches for Carlos.

Rena clutches the baby. The bottle falls and Carlos screams. Sonia's hands are on Carlos' arms. She's pulling him.

Rena relinquishes the baby. She leans down to get the bottle, gives it to Sonia.

Holding Carlos, Sonia steps back. She cleans the nipple by putting it in her mouth, puckered now like something charred. “He's mine. My baby.”

T
WO DAYS AFTER SHE
graduated from high school, Rena moved out. It was a Saturday afternoon, and Eleanor and Joe had taken Gene to the beach. She packed her clothes in two shopping bags, took the five twenties her mother had given her as a graduation gift, left a note that she'd call once she was settled and walked to the highway.

She remembers hitching a ride with a salesman headed to San Rafael who drank from a silver flask he kept in the glove compartment and scared her by calling her chicky. She remembers taking the bus from San Rafael to San Francisco and getting off at Market Street. She remembers buying a bottle of black hair dye (for reasons unclear other than that she no longer wanted to look like herself) from a Woolworth's clerk with a cherry birthmark on her cheek. She remembers walking down Sixth Street and seeing the Alta Hotel:
ROOMS—HOUR, DAY
,
WEEK, MONTH. YOU CHOOSE
.

She fumbled to find a name to register, putting together Jane Eyre and Marjorie Morningstar to get Jane Morningstar. A man with a button missing from his shirt showed her a room with a bed and a dresser and a hard-back chair and a padlock on the door. He pointed down the hall to two bathrooms, one with a toilet and sink, the other with only a tub. Carrying the bottle of hair dye and a small white towel, she walked toward the one with the tub, past rooms with their doors flung open: an old guy passed out with his fly unzipped, two enormous women seated side by side on the bed playing cards, a boy with a boom box watching a television propped on the windowsill.

She remembers the banging on the door to her room an hour later while she waited for the dye to set and opening the door to see Sammy with her platinum hair, a red silk robe stretched over her ample hips.

“Gotta plug, sweetie?”

“Excuse me?”

“A tampon.” Cigarette dangling, she fingered Rena's wet hair. Black came off on her fingers. “Jesus, what did you do? Run away from home?”

Rena looked at the floor.

The woman laughed. She was young herself. “Don't worry. I'm not going to rat you out. Last thing I need is the cops asking me questions. But you have to do something about that hair.”

“I never did it before,” Rena said apologetically.

“Go buy another bottle, brown, not black, and I'll redo it for you. I'm Sammy. Room 26.”

In the end, because the Woolworth's was closed, Rena went platinum like Sammy. “But you'll have to go short, because I don't have enough peroxide left for that mop.” Sammy spread newspapers out on the floor of her room and sat Rena in a chair. In the corner was a card table with cosmetic bottles, a hot plate and a picture of a little girl with pigtails in a swing. Rena closed her eyes while Sammy snipped. Her head grew light as her hair fell to the floor.