Red Glass (4 page)

My Feet Are Nice

His voice seemed artificially deep, as if he were trying to sound manly. He held out his hand.

I wiped the dirt off mine and shook his.

“I know you already. Sophie.”

He stood back up. I looked at him more closely. I recognized the sunglasses, the way he stood, his legs firm, but his body swaying slightly, confident as a tall tree. He held, under his arm, a small wooden box, about the size of a Kleenex box. It was made of dark, rich wood, carved and polished to a bright sheen.

Now I could place him. He’d been in my woodworking class two years earlier. I was the only girl in the class, which I rebelliously took as an elective instead of Computer Skills. Most of the guys in the class skipped it regularly. Ángel came to class about once a week.

The main thing I remembered about him was this: At the end of the semester we all displayed our pieces around the dusty worktables. Mine was a crooked little end table. One guy made a gun case, another a toolbox, another a stool. But Ángel had made a giant mahogany armoire, taller than himself, carved intricately with flowers and birds, the curves smooth, the wood brilliant. I’d assumed he’d bought it, or stolen it, or gotten it from his house and lied about making it himself.

But Mr. Mutton, the teacher, had reached an understanding with him. It turned out he had let Ángel build it in his neighbor’s wood shop, where he worked after school. When he asked Ángel to tell us how he made it, Ángel went through the process step by step, running his hands over the wood as though he knew it well, like a pet’s fur, or a girlfriend’s hair.

“You’re the one who made that gigantic armoire, right?” I asked.

“Yeah.”

“I’m surprised you recognized me.”

“You kidding?”

What did that mean? Outside of class, he was one of the guys who hung around huge pickup trucks, red or black and shiny, with
ranchera
music blaring. He was definitely not an amoeba. He was part of an organ. And the other cells of the organ: girls in halter tops and tight pants and thick eyeliner perched on the hood. Intimidatingly sexy girls. Whenever I’d pass them I’d pull my hat down over my eyes. It hadn’t occurred to me that he might have noticed me.

“You must be Pablo,” he said, turning to Pablo. “Hey, my man. Wassup?” They bumped fists.

He switched to Spanish. “You guys always sleep with the chickens?”

I felt my face warm.

Pablo nodded, serious.

“Not always,” I said.

After Ángel left to help load the van, I noticed that the plastic pearl buttons on my nightgown were low enough that you could see a shadow of cleavage. I wondered if he’d been looking there. Who knew—all I’d seen from his sunglasses was the reflection of my face.

While everyone finished loading the van, I took a quick shower, scrubbing the dust off my legs and feet. After I stepped out, I stood there, dripping, in front of the full-length mirror. Repeating a mantra I had read in a magazine article, I whispered to my reflection:
My feet are nice, my ears are nice, my elbows are nice.
Actually, I was supposed to say
beautiful
, not
nice
, but I didn’t want to push my luck.
My arms are nice, my knees are nice, my ankles are nice.

Outside, they were all waiting for me in the red Volkswagen bus. Dika in the passenger seat, Mr. Lorenzo at the wheel, Pablo and Ángel in back. I stuffed my duffel bag of clothes toward the way back, and kept with me, in the backseat, a pillowcase full of books—chocolate-stained, jam-spotted books that I’d read and reread. Pablo’s favorite poetry, a few novels, and my dog-eared
Little Prince.
A whole week in the van to get there, a week in Pablo’s village, and a week to get back. I knew I’d be too embarrassed to talk much to Ángel. I’d just try to get absorbed in my books.

“We are ready!” Dika declared. In her hand, she cupped the shard of red glass, about the size of her palm. Her version of a security blanket. She always said it was for her headaches, that when she held it up to the sun, the red light eased the pounding. “Better than the aspirin!” she insisted.

Saying goodbye to Mom and Juan was harder than I’d thought. A lump came to my throat when I hugged them. Mom whispered, “You’re in charge, Sophie.” And Juan: “If you have any problems, call us.”

What kinds of problems? Corrupt cops who demanded giant bribes? Armed drug traffickers roaming around the border? Poisonous snakes and scorpions? Amoebas and diarrhea from unsanitary food preparation?

Okay, Sophie, deep breath.
I’d gone over this a million times in my head. The cops and drug runners we’d just avoid. Go the speed limit, not give them a reason to pull us over. I wouldn’t walk anywhere where snakes and scorpions could be lurking, and I’d shake out my shoes and clothes before putting them on. And the food—I’d squeeze lime juice, a natural disinfectant, over everything. For days and nights, I’d been coming up with possible things that could go wrong and making backup plans.

“Everything’ll be fine,” I told Mom and Juan.

“You sure you want to do this, Sophie?” Mom asked.

I looked at the four people in the van. Dika and Mr. Lorenzo were examining the map, their heads close. Ángel was making faces at Pablo, bug faces with his sunglasses. Pablo looked different, and it took me a moment to figure out how. He had a smile, a smile that showed his teeth, a smile that made his eyes scrunch up. He was making a little high-pitched chipmunk sound. Pablo was laughing.

“Cool box,” Pablo said to Ángel as we exited onto the highway.

“Thanks.” Ángel held the box on his lap like a baby. He brushed his fingertips over the carvings of leaves and trees that covered it. I noticed an old-fashioned silver keyhole. I wondered if it belonged to the skeleton key that was nearly hidden in gold chains and saints and Virgins at his neck.

“You make it?” I asked.

He nodded and didn’t offer any more information. Maybe it was drugs. What if it was drugs and we got caught and sent to a Mexican prison? I didn’t know anything about this guy and his father. They could be drug dealers.

I did some deep breathing and tried to act casual. “So, what are you guys doing in Guatemala?”

“Digging up my mother’s jewels.” Ángel said this as if it were the most normal thing in the world.

Somehow I’d assumed that the buried jewels thing had been a misunderstanding on Dika’s part. Maybe they weren’t drug dealers. Maybe they were just crazy. Of course, Dika attracted crazy people. My stomach tightened, and again, that familiar feeling came, the beginnings of panic—next my heart would race and my breath quicken and my throat dry up.
Relax, Sophie. We’ve only been gone five minutes. We can turn back.

“Digging up her jewels?” I asked.

“My mom buried them. We’re digging them up.” He enunciated his words, as though that were my problem.

He leaned over between the front seats and stuck a tape into the stereo. Salsa music blared, loud and sudden. He sat back down and looked out the window and I couldn’t tell if he was awake or asleep because of those sunglasses hiding his eyes.

A little while later, while Dika and I sat in the van and Mr. Lorenzo and Ángel and Pablo peed by the roadside, I asked her, “What’s the deal with the buried jewels?”

“Mr. Lorenzo’s wife buries them long time ago.”

“I know. But why?”

“In war, when soldiers come, they take everything. You must to bury anything to save it. You must to hide your childrens, also.”

“Where’s Ángel’s mother? Is she dead?”

Dika shrugged. “They say us when they want to say us, no?”

When I was a little boy I lived in an old house, and there was a legend that a treasure was buried in it somewhere…. It cast a spell over that whole house. My house hid a secret in the depths of its heart….

“Yes,” I said to the little prince, “whether it’s a house or the stars or the desert, what makes them beautiful is invisible.”

—T
HE
L
ITTLE
P
RINCE

Silent Fireworks

Our trip had a sound track, like a film or a music video. Ángel played his shoe box full of tapes:
cumbia
, salsa, merengue—a background to the scenery out the window and the antics in the van. I liked the music. When it was on, I couldn’t stay wrapped in my separate world. The pulsing beats pulled me, like gravity, into the planet of the van. Surrounded by the music, I felt like someone else, riding into unknown territory, some adventurous woman in a movie.

Early that first morning, we passed through Nogales, the border town, which was already packed with people selling things, cars bumper to bumper, horns honking, music blaring from all directions. After we got through, we stopped to register the van with the police and pay fees. I stayed in the van reading, while Pablo ran around the parking lot and Ángel and Dika and Mr. Lorenzo talked to the officials at a booth. They were a strange sight—Dika, looking large and pink and nearly naked in her white tennis shorts and sapphire tank top, next to Mr. Lorenzo in his quilted flannel shirt, which he seemed to wear all the time, and Ángel in his sunglasses and baseball cap and chains.

By the time we started driving again, the sun was high overhead, burning my skin through the window. For lunch we ate food that Dika and I had prepared before the trip—ham sandwiches, apples, chips, and for dessert, fruitcake. She adored fruitcake. The bright green and red bits of candied fruit thrilled her. She brought nine tins along, and when Mom had accused her of going overboard, she shrieked, “But five of them are gifts!”

Outside the window, the dry, brown earth met an endless stretch of hazy sky. Patches of green were few and far between. Every couple of miles we passed a cluster of cement-block houses, in various stages of construction, some painted pink or blue in a failed effort to cheer things up. The signs also tried to make things seem less hellish:
JESUS’S JUNKYARD, GOD’S GAS STATION
. Once in a while we passed smoldering trash fires at the roadside, and giant lots of rusted cars and machine parts.

It turned out that Ángel did like to talk, as long as it wasn’t about his mother’s buried jewels. He told story after story about all the crazy things he’d seen and done. He had a way of making his stories sad and funny and exciting all at once. He talked about the dog he’d had in Guatemala who was so smart he could say words in Mayan. About how, when he was a little kid, he fell backward into a giant pot of chicken soup over the fire and burned his butt and had to sleep on his stomach for a week. Pablo giggled at his stories, tentatively, trying out this laughing thing.

Late that afternoon, Pablo rummaged through my pillowcase, then quietly dropped into my lap a book of poetry by Pablo Neruda—his favorite, mainly, I suspected, because they had the same name. At first I said no, too embarrassed to read in front of Ángel. But Pablo pleaded. So I agreed to read a few stanzas, about slicing a lemon, and how the lemon was really a cup of miracles, a universe of gold. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Ángel staring. I wondered if behind the sunglasses he was watching my lips move as intently as Pablo was.

“More!” Pablo said, once I finished.

I shook my head, glancing at Ángel. He took off his seat belt and wedged himself on his knees between the front and back seats, and said, “We beg you!”

Pablo giggled, and I flipped a few pages to a poem about a diver who floats up from his underwater “pit of solitude” and gets reborn. As Ángel and Pablo listened intently, I forgot about being an amoeba and became part of the little cluster of cells in this van.

When the sun dropped low and the light grew gentle, we stopped in a dusty small town for dinner.
RESTAURANT FANNY
, the sign read. We sat at a little table covered with a torn plastic tablecloth with a red flower design. After our food came, the owner, Fanny, came over and apologized about the flies buzzing around us. Before I knew what was happening, she was enthusiastically spraying bug repellent over our tacos. Naturally, my fear-of-being-poisoned fear was activated.

“Stop!” My voice sounded shrill. I tried to steady it. I tried to think of a legitimate excuse. “I’m allergic to that.”

She gave me a strange look and a halfhearted “Sorry,
señorita
,” and moved to another table.

“Oh, Sophie,” Dika said. “You have allergy to everything! In U.S.A., everyone have allergy. In my country, no. We are strong.”

And she went on and on about how Americans were allergy wusses. As she talked I could almost feel my throat closing up. There were no windows in the restaurant, so the toxic odor of bug spray lingered. I squeezed lime all over my food, drenching it, although I figured maybe the bug spray had killed some germs on contact, too.

“How much lime you are going to put on that?” Dika asked, her eyes wide.

I ignored her.

Ángel came to my defense. “Lime’s good for you. Lots of vitamin C, right, lime-girl?”

Dika laughed, a snort that blew Pepsi out her mouth. “Lime-girl!”

But Mr. Lorenzo nodded, serious. “In my country, we use the limes like medicine, for the sore throat and the cough and the cold. For anything.”

I appreciated that Mr. Lorenzo stood up for me. He was quiet and shy and didn’t talk much, just gave Dika soft-eyed looks every so often.

“Lime-girl” is what Ángel started calling me, and I didn’t mind it. I’d never had a nickname before. If someone gave you a nickname, it meant you were part of an organism.

Later in the van that night: “Hey, lime-girl, turn up the music. Lime-girl, pass me some cookies. Lime-girl, look—an armadillo.”

Dika burst out laughing every time he said lime-girl. Her shrieks and laughter were another part of the sound track. When Mr. Lorenzo passed another car, for the brief moments we were in the lane of oncoming traffic, she gripped the door handle, threw one hand over her mouth, widened her eyes.
“Mein Gott! Mein Gott!”
she squealed until we were safely back in our own lane. Who knew why she shifted to German.

Mr. Lorenzo put his hand on her thigh for a moment. “Calm down. Is okay, miss.” Calling a sixty-year-old “miss” seemed ridiculous, but she ate it up. She looked out the window and smiled with such clear-eyed pleasure it was hard to stay irritated with her.

The first night we stopped outside a little coastal town called San Carlos, so close to the ocean you could smell the salty, fishy breezes. Dika wanted to spend the night right on the beach so that she could work on her tan the next morning, but I reminded her we’d promised Mom and Juan we’d go straight to Pablo’s village, with no delays, no distractions, no sidetracking. Dika shook her head. “Oh, you must to have more fun in the life, Sophie!”

At the roadside next to a cluster of low, spiky cacti, we raised the van’s pop-top to sleep—me and Dika on the bottom bunk, Mr. Lorenzo and Ángel above us, and Pablo on a sleeping bag on the backseat. My body was squeezed to about a foot of the bed, while Dika’s body spread out like rising dough, pushing me to the edge. Lying there, trying to sleep, I worried that the upper bunk would collapse onto us.

After Dika started snoring, and some loud asthmatic breathing came from the upper bunk, there was movement above and then, a pressure on my thigh.

“Oops, sorry, lime-girl.” Ángel moved his foot and dropped down from the upper bunk. “Didn’t mean to step on you.” He didn’t have his sunglasses on, or a shirt, just the gold chains that glinted light from somewhere. Until that moment I’d never caught a glimpse of his eyes, always the mirrored glasses reflecting my own face. There were tiny laugh wrinkles at the corners of his eyes. They seemed raw, vulnerable.

As he opened the van door, a little trail of sparks flew in his wake. Maybe static from his clothes and the sleeping bag. While he was outside, I felt a warm spot where his foot had touched the sheet over my thigh. When he came back through the van, he left another small trail of sparks, silent miniature fireworks.

The next morning, Ángel asked me questions, as though he was really interested in me.
What is your favorite thing to do, Sophie? What are your dreams? Do you like morning or night best? What are you reading? What’s it about?

Then he asked if he could braid my hair.

“You know how to braid hair?” This surprised me.

“My mother taught me when I was little. I used to braid her hair.”

Ángel braiding my hair sent tingles from my scalp down to every cell in my body. And then a wave of warmth that made me want to melt back into him. He smoothed my hair and parted it down the middle.

I hadn’t worn my hair in two braids for ages. His fingers sectioned off the chunk of hair into three parts, gently pulling it taut, and working his way down with quick careful fingers. He wrapped a rubber band around the first braid and moved on to the second. I wished he would slow down to make it last longer.

“You know what your hair’s like?” he said. “That silky part of the corn, when you peel back the husk.”

I swallowed hard, afraid to break the spell.

After he wrapped the rubber band on the second braid, he ran his hand down its length, and said, “It’s not even. Let me do this one again.”

“Your niece is very pretty,” Mr. Lorenzo said to Dika that afternoon. “Like her great-aunt.”

“Oh, Mr. Lorenzo!” Dika slapped his shoulder. “Like her mother!”

Sometimes when old people look at me, they say that I am on the road to looking like my mother. I attribute it to cataracts.

“But she doesn’t have boyfriend!” Dika lamented. Her eyes flicked at me in the mirror. She winked. She was playing matchmaker. I looked out the window, past the rolling hills to the Sierra Madre mountains, and hoped Dika would drop it before Ángel woke up.

“No boyfriend?” Mr. Lorenzo said dramatically.

I glanced at Ángel, and luckily, his breathing was still steady, his lips slightly parted, his head leaning against the other window.

“No boyfriend!” Dika repeated. I prayed she would stop here.

Boys do not look at you
, Dika had told me bluntly one day at the pool,
and this is your fault.
I tried to ignore her, hoped the college guys dunking each other hadn’t heard her. That night I’d asked Mom if she thought it was my fault. She was more delicate.
Sophie
, she told me,
you send the message that your body and your mind and your soul—none of it is anyone’s business.
Juan offered another opinion. He said that guys my age can’t look at true beauty in the face—it scares them, blinds them like the sun. They feel more comfortable with mediocre girls, he said, mediocre prettiness, mediocre minds.

I liked Juan’s explanation best. But really, Dika was right. It was my fault. Boys scared me, like nearly everything else in the world.

That evening, Ángel was driving, and I was next to him. It was dusk, and the mountains were dark silhouettes against the purple sky. The others were asleep in the backseat. A bizarre family—Dika in her blue-and-white-striped tube top, her tanned freckled arms around skinny little Pablo. On the other side, stout Mr. Lorenzo in his flannel shirt. Dika’s and Mr. Lorenzo’s heads leaned against each other, touching, forming a strange upside-down triangle.

Here on our little van planet, everything felt comfortable, as if I was exactly where I was supposed to be. Ángel wore his sunglasses, despite the growing darkness. “Why do you always wear those shades?” I asked.

“’Cause your skin’s so white it glares.”

“Thanks.” I reached out and punched his arm, jokingly, the first time I’d ever touched a guy that way. I put my feet on the dashboard, pressed them against the windshield, leaving imprints of my toes, the soles of my feet.

“Why
are
you so white, lime-girl? Why isn’t your skin dark like your dad’s?”

“Juan’s not my real dad. My real dad left days after I was born.”

“What an
idiota.
”

“It wasn’t his fault. I stunk. I cried too much. I was skinny and ugly. So he left.”

“Fathers don’t leave ’cause of an ugly baby.”

“You’ve never seen my baby pictures.”

“And your mom’s so hot,” he said. “Why would anyone leave her?”

I rolled my eyes and looked out the window.

“Why does your mom think he left?”

I reclined the seat and stared at the torn fabric of the ceiling. “My dad was in trouble with the law, dealing acid. He jumped bail and left the state, but my mom wouldn’t go with him. She had her prenatal visits and I was a high-risk pregnancy. She ended up having an emergency delivery, and he came back to see her. He wanted her to come with him. But I had to be in an incubator for a while, so she said she was staying. And he left.”

“So it wasn’t that you were ugly,” Ángel said.

“According to Mom, no,” I admitted. “I get the feeling she thinks my dad was a loser. But I’ve seen pictures. I was four pounds and scrawny and cried all the time. I was ugly, really ugly, red and wrinkled and skinny like a little alien.”

“Lots of ugly babies turn out pretty. He probably knew that.”