Amor and Psycho: Stories (8 page)

AS A LITTLE BOY
, Harald used to climb into her bed in the evenings to read. Once, when she asked him why, he said, “Because it’s warm.” Babe said, “We haven’t been in bed for fifteen hours!” And Harald shrugged and said, “It’s
still
warm.”

More recently, Babe remembered his brown eyes looking up at her from over the top of some book—
Nausea
, by Jean-Paul Sartre, or
The Sorrows of Young Werther
, by Goethe, or
Pain
,
Sex and Time
, by Gerald Heard, or
Astrophysics of Gaseous Nebulae
, by whomever—the humor there, the bit of perversity. He said, “Mom, you should smile more.”

Babe yelled, “Are you kidding? I am the only person in this family who smiles every single day! I smile at customers! I smile at you!”

Harald said, “No, I mean you should smile—for fun.” And he smiled his dazzling rare smile, because he’d caught her shouting, at the end of her rope.

*   *   *

ONE AFTERNOON
, Georgie called and asked how Harald was doing in the hospital. “About as badly as possible,” said Babe. “What else is new?”

Georgie said, “I found out this morning that I have breast cancer.” When Georgie said the words
breast cancer
, Babe looked at the stone in her hand—a five-pounder. A window closed, leaving just a tiny aperture through which Babe saw her hand and the stone in her hand.

“Left-handed women are more likely to get it,” Georgie went on in a clinical voice. “Something to do with asymmetry in the female, more hormones gathering in vessels on the left side, near the spleen. The left arm acts as a kind of hormone switch, turning the estrogen off and on.”

“Who told you that?” asked Babe.

“I was up all night, reading.”

Babe thought of Georgie’s left hand always in motion, setting type, scissoring a chicken up its back, stirring up a pitcher of caipirinhas. Writing a list, Georgie held her pen in that protective way lefties do. Chopping an onion or writing a letter or deadheading her roses, Georgie switched the chemical sauna on and off.

“What are you going to do?” Babe asked.

“What else can I do? Raw foods, single-malt scotch, surgery, radiation and chemotherapy. I’m going to do it all.” Georgie laughed a gutsy, throaty laugh, like an old lounge singer. “Oh, but wait, do you want to hear the best part?”

“Hit me,” said Babe.

“They create the new one while you’re still on the operating
table. They use your own love handles, can you believe it? The larger your love handles, the bigger the boobs.”

Georgie sounded tough over the phone, and Babe, scared and horrified, laughed with her. She remembered later how hard and loudly they laughed at how tough they were going to be.

Scarface was obnoxious, but he had charisma. The first time I met him, he showed me a coffee can with dead tadpoles in the bottom. He offered to sell them—with the coffee can—for ten dollars. I drove him home from Madrigal to the rez. He asked if, when I bought my car, it came with the engine. I said the car came with the engine. Then he asked whether it came with the key.

I admired his directness. “Listen, you’re a hippie,” he said. “Can you get me some weed?”

“You want me to get you some weed.”

“If you get me some weed, I can get you commodities. Peanut butter, apple juice, powdered eggs—whatever you want.”

“Dream on,” I said.

“If you get me weed, I’ll make you
breakfast
, you know what I mean?” Scarface smiled benignly.

I didn’t answer. How could I? He was only twelve. Just outside town, I turned up a stretch of road that ran through hills and gullies that bloomed with wild mustard and fennel and cow parsnip and the carcasses of American-made cars named after wild horses. One end of this road opened at the rez, with its HUD houses and rosebushes, where Scarface lived. On the other end stood the Assembly of God. In between, we passed a ranch where a wealthy couple from Los Angeles had brought hundreds of rare wild birds. Immediately the turkey farm across the road sued them for bringing in exotic bird diseases, and someone shot their dogs.

“You saying I’m ugly?” Scarface shouted suddenly. “Huh? ’Cause I’m packing heat!” He pointed to his penis.

This was a test. Sure, Scarface was ugly, as enormous and threatening as possible for a person his age, not yet full-grown. His face looked like a knife wound. But beautiful, too.

“I have to keep my eyes on the road,” I lied.

“If you get me some weed, I’ll forgive white people for all the injustices done to Indians,” he said.

“Scarface,” I said, “how can you forgive white people?”

He looked out the window at the dusty plain of the turkey farm and said, “If I didn’t know how to forgive people, I wouldn’t have no family or friends.”

It was true. Scarface’s own father had shot and killed two men in a state of such profound drunkenness that at the trial he could not recall the crime, the men or his reasons. He lived in prison—the worst one. Scarface’s mother did odd jobs with men.

Scarface couldn’t really read—he spelled his own name “Scrafac” on a piece of paper he gave me with his telephone number on it. I don’t know what they did with him in fifth grade; he still held the pencil in his fist. I would have liked to take Scarface away and make him mine—but you can’t do that. Whatever my reasons were for wanting Scarface, they were the wrong reasons. I bought him pickles and jerky and doughnut holes at the gas station, and loved him the way you might love someone for his money or his beauty.

AROUND THE TIME
I started my gig with Artists in the Schools and got to know Scarface—the year of my messy and depressing separation—my sister, Carrie, called from the Democratic Republic of the Congo, where she’d been teaching in a private school. Her life, she said, had become worthwhile and exciting. She’d forgiven me for being one of the neglectful figures from her childhood. In fact, she invited me to come and visit. She spoke of the political situation; after the most recent eruptions, the State Department began to worry about all her “kids”—diplomats’ children and children of the ruling families—being sitting ducks, but all they did, at the school, was to postpone a field trip to the capital, where rape and machetes were “of concern.”

“That sounds dangerous,” I said.

“We went to see the bonobos instead,” said Carrie.

A few weeks later, Carrie called again to say she’d been evacuated and had moved to another country in Africa,
where she was doing important work with Doctors Without Borders, treating girls and women with fistulas, ruptures and internal damage from rape, long labors in childbirth, or babies too big for the child-size birth canals of the youngest or most malnourished girls. This damage had rendered many incontinent; they’d lost the wall between vagina and anus, and lived in shame.

“You should come,” Carrie said. “Then you’d see.”

SCARFACE KNEW
about bonobos from watching the Discovery Channel. Bonobos were his favorite kind of ape. They could pick up a teacup with their toes and drink from it. They didn’t force the females to have sex with them—they fucked equally and by agreement. Scarface put a bonobo in the mural even though we’d agreed not to deviate too much from the sketches we’d made, or from our local history theme. We’d agreed to depict salmon and kelp, redwoods and round houses, Pomo women weaving baskets from redbud and willow and men dressed for dancing in flicker headbands and feather skirts. Painting the mural was supposed to help kids like Scarface reclaim their own narratives. (I’d written these words myself in several successful grant proposals.) The city had agreed that we could use the wall of the Lions Club for the mural, but then it immediately granted a permit for the medical center next door to expand into the parking lot.

A truck brought in three modular buildings in one day,
creating an alley between the medical center and the mural. The public would never see our work; on the other hand, we had a county grant and artistic freedom.

I wanted to bring the mural into the present tense, break down some of the old romanticized imagery. There weren’t even any redwoods on the rez; it was a floodplain. Scarface had probably seen more bonobos on the Discovery Channel than salmon in the Rez River. I told the kids, “Paint what you see around you, not what people tell you is there.” One of the kids put in his grandma on kidney dialysis, smoking a pipe. Another contributed a kitchen sink with brown water running out of it. On Tuesday and Thursday afternoons, we painted in the shadows. At night, kids sold drugs and drank beer around the mural. I think they were drawn by the liminal quality of the space, and by the mural itself, which every day became more complicated, beautiful and hard to read.

Scarface didn’t like to take the late bus—kids teased him about the men who climbed in through his mother’s bedroom window—so after we worked on the mural, I drove him home. One time, we talked about the mural and the bonobos; then Scarface shared some letters he said his girlfriend, Maria, had written to him. I probably shouldn’t have let him go on, but his confidence and expression amazed me. Wasn’t Scarface supposed to be illiterate?

“You read those well,” I said finally, and he said, “Well, I already
know
what they say.”

I pulled into his driveway. A dog stood on a car’s roof in the yard, barking. A girl also stood in the yard, staring
up into a pine tree. She had a round face and a round body and very long black hair that had been oiled for lice and pulled back into a bun. Her eyes were brown and deep. “My cousin,” Scarface explained. “Maria.”

“Scarface,” the girl shouted, “your big brother threw my
thong
up in that tree.”

“Why don’t you climb up and get it?” he asked.

“You don’t know what’s been in that tree,” Maria said, and grinned.

Scarface flashed me a beautiful smile from his ugly mug and slammed the car door behind him.

THE LAST TIME
my sister came to visit, she rode my bicycle into town every day and leaned it up against a tree behind the coffeehouse where she spent her mornings writing e-mail and opening up her heart to the regulars. Carrie has always impressed people with her stories and with her résumé, which she can recite like a villanelle. She suffered damage as a child from having been kissed and fondled by an uncle, which led to her radical identification with the oppressed. She worked at a rape crisis center and a suicide hot line, then put herself through nursing and business school, overcame asthma and anorexia, studied French, and became the crusader she is today. Carrie’s lived and worked in seven countries, four of them in Africa. We’ve had different experiences, different lives, Carrie and I. Carrie says no, we just have different versions of reality.

I asked if she locked it—the bike—and she said, “The trouble with you is that you have no faith in people.” When someone finally stole the bike, she called me for a ride home and refused to go back to my “low-life” town. Carrie’s like that—rigid, unilateral.

Love
is a degraded word. I love my coffee in the morning. I love sunsets and those arias from Handel’s operas—
Agrippina, Atalanta, Lotario, Samson
—sung by Renée Fleming that my ex-husband turned me on to. I feel a complicated mix of ambivalent affections for my sister, but the truth is, I have never loved her, didn’t even when we were children.

Our uncle Gene, a policeman, caused a scandal, statutory, which infected our whole family before my sister and I were born. He lost his job, and even did time in prison. When my sister was coming up, three years behind me, nobody wanted to open old wounds. Uncle Gene wasn’t young or handsome or powerful anymore. Carrie was large and quick enough to defend herself—or, it was felt, she should have been. Even now the words my sister uses to describe her life
—molested, abandoned, alone, exposed
—sound exaggerated. My sister always seemed dull and literal to me; I loved intrigue and secrets.

Uncle Gene died of a gangrenous leg in Aunt Bea’s living room. Aunt Bea was much older than she had expected to be when he died—but still relieved. Within a month, though, she stopped breathing fluently and had to drag around a small oxygen tank. She said, “I know it sounds pathetic, but all I really want is a cigarette.”

From Aunt Bea I learned that you could hate your life and still love life.

As far as I know, Uncle Gene never
forced
anybody to do anything. But he was persuasive. He made girls feel something, and when they were really feeling it, Uncle Gene was there with his avuncular touch. He was, of course, a bad man. But just as great individuals are sometimes scarred by flaws, can’t a bad man be varnished by qualities?

Because of my experiences with Uncle Gene (the playful banter, the pressure and push-back, the tickling, the touching, the lap-sits, the terrible, interesting frankness of his desire), I understand boundaries and enjoy controlling them. Because of him, I’m not afraid of red zones in human relations, just as my sister is drawn to her African hot spots.

In the mural, I gave Uncle Gene a cameo, a little piece of the action, even though he isn’t part of local history. I painted him lying on his back with his arms spread out, very flat and stylized, completely open. I could have emphasized his vulnerability, or punished him in some way, had his liver pecked at by ravens. But what interests me about this uncle is not his amorality—it’s his freedom.

SCARFACE HAD BEEN ASKING
since September what I was going to buy him for Christmas. “Jews don’t celebrate Christmas,” I told him.

“But
I
celebrate Christmas,” Scarface said. “And what I’d really like is a bag of weed.”

Just before winter break, I arranged to take my students to the city for a day—a two-plus hour drive—to see the murals in the library, city hall, and a mosque. It turned out everyone had a grant for a mural; everyone had a narrative they needed to reclaim.

No one showed up except Scarface, so we drove down together. At the library, we walked through a detecting machine. “It’s to make sure you aren’t walking away with a book that isn’t checked out,” I explained.