More Than Allies (6 page)

She brushes at the wrinkles in her skirt, then splashes her face at the kitchen sink. She goes to her car, and thinks about going over to Lupe's, the pleasure on Lupe's face: oh comadre, she'll say, come in and I will give you a cold drink. She'll put her in the one soft chair, near the table she uses as an altar, covered with a crocheted throw, a statue of the Virgin, a picture of the Sacred Heart, votive candles and rosaries and holy cards, postcard photos of a cathedral in Mexico City. The babies will try to crawl onto Dulce's lap, and she will kiss their fat cheeks and say how fast they're growing. In a little while, she'll ask what Lupe needs, this woman in a trailer with no hot water, four children, an absent husband, no English, and complete faith in the will of God.

It makes Dulce so tired, she leans her forehead against the steering wheel and sighs. She wonders if the school meant this to happen, if someone said, why we'll put this big Mexican boy in Gus Quirarte's class so that they can look out for one another, for who else should? They stand out, two dark broad-faced boys with shiny straight hair, though Hilario is a head taller. And it's true, the boys have grown so close they seem to be excluding everyone else, and Lupe has grown fervently attached to Dulce, who, after all, speaks English, is a citizen, knows her way around. Has a car.

For the Hinojosas are illegal, and Lupe will not—cannot—ask anyone in the government for help. She works several afternoons a week at a laundromat, paid “under the table.” She cleans each pot of beans she feeds her family to the last morsel. They live in a trailer on a lot near the freeway exit, behind the filling station where her husband Cipriano has worked since their truck broke down in February, passing through Lupine on the way to California from Christmas tree planting. Only Cipriano has gone to Chihuahua to see his sick mother, and all that Dulce can think is, maybe he won't come back. She wonders if Lupe wouldn't be better off in Chihuahua, too, but when she asked why they didn't all go, Lupe said, it is too hard to cross. It is too hard to come back, and we are already here.

As she puts the key into the ignition, she looks up and sees her son loping across the intersection toward the trailer court. He is with Hilario. At the corner, only two car lengths away, the boys pause, give one another a slap of palms in the air above their heads, and Hilario runs back toward home. Dulce watches, and sees how her son swaggers, a child imitating a man. She is about to call out to him when she hears his name, sees Hilario turned again, gesturing for him to come. She watches Gus run across the street, where Hilario is leaning into a low-slung car parked at the curb. Horrified, she sees the boys open the car doors and slide in. She jumps out of her car and runs over to them. Hilario's hands are on the steering wheel. She hears him as she reaches the car. Vroom! vroom! he says. Gus is laughing, and bangs on the dashboard.

She jerks open the door and slaps her hand on her son's shoulder. “Get out of there!” she shouts. Both boys are instantly silent, shocked, turned to stare at her. “What do you think you're doing!” she screeches. Her hand is clamped on his arm.

“Mom!” he protests, shoving at her hand. “Okay, okay.” He crawls out, pushing against her body, as Hilario gets out the other side. “Es nada,” Hilario says. “We don't do nothing.” He tries to laugh. “A yoke,” he mispronounces. He looks at her with the native, jocular insolence of a cocky young man. Already he knows women will defer to him.

“Go home!” she says sharply. He shrugs, turns, and runs away.

To her son, she says, “Where were you?” though she knows.

She marches him across the street. By her car, she pauses. Her chest hurts. She realizes that, in fact, they were doing nothing, boys acting silly in an unlocked car. She puts her hands on her son's arm again. Intently, she looks at him and she says, “You have to understand. Two Mexican boys in someone's car. It doesn't matter that it was nothing. You would get in so much trouble.”

“Mom, we knew the car. It's Mr. Nathan's car. The P.E. teacher. What would he do to us? He left it unlocked. We weren't hurting it.”

She makes herself take a deep breath, takes her hands away. She points to her car. “Get in.

“Did you eat?” she asks. He presses himself against the far door. He mumbles something about a tamale.

“What? What were you doing?”

They were watching the little kids while Lupe was at the laundromat. She left tamales.

“I haven't eaten,” Dulce says.

He sits up. “I'm still hungry.”

“I heard from your father,” she says. She didn't know she was going to say that. “From Texas.”

His head jerks up. “What's he want, Mom? Is he coming?”

“He wants you—us—he wants us to come to Texas. To his folks.”

“When, Mama? We will go, won't we?”

“I don't know. I don't know.”

“Does it cost too much? On the bus?”

“He sent money.”

“I want to go!”

“I don't know yet. School's not out. We'll see then. In June.”

“There are ways to get to Texas,” he says sulkily. It's a dare. She has told him how her papa walked the last forty miles to the border, to save his pesos for the crossing, his first time.

“I haven't made any supper,” she says. “We could go for hamburgers.”

He shrugs. She knows he wants to go.

She reaches for his hand. “Let's get through the school year,” she says. “You know how I am about you missing school.”

He pulls his hand away and gets quickly out of the car and runs to the trailer. Sighing, she pulls away from the curb. She'll get food and bring it back. She'll tell him she knows he wants his father, though she wonders what he thinks that means. She will say he isn't big enough to go all that way on the bus, but she knows he can do it, knows, too, that sooner or later he will. She will try not to think how that will break her heart.

After supper the four of them—Polly, Maggie, and the children—lined up cozily on the couch to watch videos of cartoon movies. Jay slumped against his mother and played the little boy, until some idle gesture of affection on her part reminded him he was unhappy, and he inched away. Stevie, seated on her other side, pointed and called out “Mousie!” about a hundred times, whatever the nature of the characters. Polly, benign, put on her bifocals and worked a crossword puzzle, no doubt relieved at the relative peace.

Later, Jay took his comic books to bed down the hall. Maggie bathed Stevie, getting in the tub with her, taking a long time, making a game of soaping and washing and rinsing. When Stevie was in her crib and quiet, Maggie went in to see Jay. She sat on the bed and put her hand on his knee over the covers. His cheek where the can had struck him was purple. He made a show of turning the page of a comic book—all his comics starred great hulking powerful men and dastardly villains capable of shocking crimes—and not wanting to be disturbed. Maggie sat quietly.

Mo's boyhood room, where she had lived for three years, had been changed a couple of times since then. As Mo's father grew more and more ill with lung cancer, Polly stripped the room of its girlish frills, bought new green sheets, and installed him there to die. Maggie couldn't help thinking of her suspicions about the room that day of her arrival. More recently, she and Gretchen had painted the room a pleasant peach color and hung posters of art by Matisse, Balthus and Gauguin. Little by little, Jay had deposited various toys and books in the room. He slept there often, times his mother stayed late talking with Polly or watching TV, or because he wanted to be in a room of his own. He knew it had been his father's room. “Did Dad have his bed like this?” he'd asked more than once. “Where did Granny put all of Dad's toys?” he asked another time. (The answer: the garage. Most of them, however, had been hauled out for Jay himself as a smaller boy.)

“Would you like to skip school tomorrow?” Maggie asked.

He glanced up, surprised, then tamped down his pleasure. “Whatever.”

“I thought you could sleep in. I want to keep an eye on your eye.” She smiled. It did sound funny. He didn't get it, though. He didn't so much as blink. “And if you want, we could go for a hike or a ride or something. How does that sound?”

She could see he wanted to be enthusiastic but wouldn't allow her the pleasure.

“Okay.”

“Honey, is there something you want to say?”

The sadness of his expression made her throat constrict. Then he tossed his comic book to the end of the bed and crawled down under the covers.

“Would you like to call Dad tomorrow?”

He flopped over, his back to her. “What for?” he said, his words muffled by the covers.

“Sleep tight,” she said. She didn't know what else to say.

Polly was watching a movie starring Doris Day and Rock Hudson. “Silly, aren't they?” she said, but it was clear she was enjoying it. Maggie kissed her goodnight and went to Gretchen's room. The big bed was piled with pillows and stuffed animals, quilts and magazines, shed clothing and brochures from wilderness travel agencies. Maggie fluffed pillows, folded the clothes, arranged the magazines on the bedside stand, and crawled in to wait for Gretchen. The theatre was dark tonight, and Maggie assumed she'd gone to Blake's for what must be very close to the last night they would have before their ninety-day love affair came to a halt.

Poor Gretchen, she thought, making herself comfortable against the pillows. She should have stuck with the river guide last summer, the one who ate gorp and built his own sweat lodge.

She got back up and fetched a tattered copy of
The Golden Notebook
from Gretchen's bookshelf. How she had struggled to read it for her book group last year! The discussion had been a volley between Nora and Rachel (politics and sex), until Lynn said she found Lessing humorless, and could they move on to something contemporary, please? Through it all, Maggie was thrilled to be there. She still thought it was amazing to have been asked to join such a clever group.

As she was mulling over these things, weariness overcame her and she fell asleep with the light on. She was still lying like that when Gretchen came home around midnight.

“Doris Lessing!” Gretchen picked up the book and waved it over Maggie's face. “No wonder you were sleeping deeply.” She laughed and tossed the book to a corner of the room. Maggie didn't think the laugh sounded merry.

“You know what one of the actors said to me at the lounge last night?” she asked Maggie as she changed into pajamas. “He said, ‘Gretchen, you are looking wan.' I laughed, of course, so he laughed too, but he felt sorry for me, you could see it in his eyes.” She slid under the covers. “Do you think everyone knows what an ass I've made of myself, fucking Phoebe Alex's husband?”

“I never thought actors were prudes.” Maggie envied Gretchen her job, which had opened up the very day Polly called in her cards after twenty years of volunteering at the theatre.

“I suppose they're not,” Gretchen said, lying back and staring straight up at the ceiling. Maggie remembered that there were fluorescent dots up there, a rendering of a summer's night sky. She didn't think Gretchen was ready for the dark yet, though.

“I was at Blake's.”

“I thought you might spend the night,” Maggie said, though she was glad Gretchen had come home. It felt very sisterly to lie in bed and talk until sleep overcame them. They had done so hundreds of times over the years. They'd lain right here and sobbed half the night before Gretchen married dreadful Mark and went off to Alaska for two years.

She would tell Gretchen about Mo's letter and they would talk until she figured out what she felt about it.

“We weren't at the apartment. He's moved everything out. We went to the new house.”

“No!” The new house was Phoebe Alex's house, and she would be in it any day now, arriving in Lupine from six months on location in Mexico.

“He took me around to show me all the rooms, the deck in the moonlight, the kitchen. It has an island with a granite top. A pink sink.” Gretchen turned over onto her stomach and propped herself up on her elbows. “He didn't have a bed yet. We were on some quilts on the floor. Then, while I was dressing, he lay there staring at me. ‘What?' I asked him. He didn't say anything. Couldn't he say he's sorry? He thinks he's said everything. Phoebe is his wife. Phoebe needs him. He's a stage manager for chrissake! What does she need him for? They're not in graduate school anymore. She's a movie star.”

“An actress, anyway,” Maggie said, bored. She'd heard this a lot lately.

“She's going to be a star, all right. This movie has all the chemistry, I hear. And not from him. I hear some of the actors talking. She's got nude scenes. Imagine that—being naked with a man all over you while a crew watches. God.”

“Maybe he does love her.”

Gretchen fell onto her back again. “Do you ever think how many times we've been here, talking about our lives?”

“I remember speculating what would happen if a boy put his penis in and it got caught.” Maggie hoped she had successfully changed the subject. “I remember asking you if you were sure about Mark.”

“Don't rub it in,” Gretchen said, but not crossly. Whatever bad feelings she had about Unalakleet were old and forgotten. Since then she had sewn polarlite vests for Patagonia, in California. She'd been a waitress in Aspen. She'd come home to her mother, her childhood bed, her best friend.

“I remember asking you what your brother was like. Before I ever met him.” It was pointless, but Maggie realized suddenly that what she wanted to do was tell Gretchen everything she already knew: how she rode the bus to Texas and fell in love with Mo. How everything came together in her life when Jay was born. “He wrote me an amazing letter,” she whispered. “I don't know what to make of it.”