The Boy (3 page)

It could only have been years before, when the boy had been too young to make an impression. She had a fairly sturdy recollection of the boy’s entirely unexpected acceptance into an Ivy League school because Richard wouldn’t shut up about the money.

“I could buy a house, I could own real estate in Florida.”

“Don’t send him.”

“The room deposit? A thousand bucks.”

“He doesn’t need to go.”

“The textbooks? Two grand.”

“Keep him home. Have him polish your shoes. It’s a dying art.”

“Tuition? Don’t get me started on tuition.”

“He could set up a stand at Grand Central Station.”

“People
live
on that kind of money. They
live
on it.”

“Or Penn Station. There’s always Penn Station.”

He’d pushed her out the door with the excuse that his youngest son, Mickey, had tripped and hit his head. “I know, bud,” she heard him say as the door closed shut. “It’s that table. How about we get rid of that table? You and me, huh?”

But that was all. That was all she could remember.

Anna parked, crossed S. Street, feeling, as she did, the hard mineral aggregate of the high desert on her tongue and wondering for the millionth time why she, who loved water so much, had settled on such badly broken ground. There was a town in the state called No Agua. It wasn’t that far away.

She inspected the row of names on the buzzer, pushed the one that said Dr. Roemer, climbed one flight of stairs to the waiting room, picked up a magazine, beheld a woman’s naked buttocks for a split second, then let her eyes drift to the window—to a tree shooting up like a tongue of silver fire against the unfiltered blue of the New Mexican sky. “Relax,” the boy had said with the authority conferred by zero obligations, zero deadlines, a handful of bonds—and then only of the lightest fabric.

“I slept like shit,” she told Dr. Roemer before even sitting down. The doctor’s face was like a slab of stone.

“You always sleep like shit.”

“Which is my curse, my cross to bear, but last night was worse.”

“Why was it worse?”

“I met a boy.”

“Whose boy?”

“You mean whose son?”

The doctor, a man bovine in mass and apparent temperament, gave her a slow nod.

“My neighbor’s son,” she said. “Friend and neighbor, actually. Good friend, stellar neighbor. Waters my plants when I’m away.”

“Does he know?”

“What?”

“That you’re sleeping with his son.”

“Who’s sleeping with his son? I’m not sleeping with his son. You think terrible things about me. All the time you think terrible things. Like I don’t pay you. Like I walk away without paying you.”

“Why did you sleep like shit then?”

“Because I kept thinking about my neighbor’s son, which is different from sleeping with my neighbor’s son. It’s a comparatively innocuous occupation, you must admit.”

“But you couldn’t stop.”

“Stop what?”

“Thinking about him.”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“Let’s see. Chemistry. Physical attraction. My body. His body. You know.”

“His body wasn’t in your room last night. It’s not in this room today.”

Anna cocked her head.

“Excuse me?”

“His body is not in this room.”

“So?”

“So what are you attracted to?”

Anna let her eyes wander. “I’m weary of your traps, Doctor Roemer, so I’ll tentatively, very tentatively, say the idea of his body.”

“That’s right. An idea that lives in your mind, which is the same thing as a story you’re telling yourself: I need this boy’s body to be happy.”

“Who’s talking about happiness? This is sex at its most basic.”

“Fine, let’s try a little variation. I need sex with this boy to be happy. Is that true?”

“It’s not untrue.”

“So you have sex. Because of the nature of your attraction, you keep having sex. Then you start wanting things a . . . how old is he?”

“Twenty. Maybe twenty-one.”

“Okay. You start wanting things a twenty-year-old can’t give you and he starts wanting things a forty-year-old can’t give him, and what happens next?”

“Train wreck.”

The doctor smiled. “So let’s do this one more time. I need sex with this boy to be happy. Is that true?”

“No.”

“And if that’s not true,
what is?
”

For a while neither of them spoke.

“I don’t know,” Anna said. “I don’t know what’s true.”

The doctor clapped a soundless clap. “In China they say, live in a state of constant unknowingness.”

“We’re not in China.”

“China, not China, it’s all the same. If you were prepared to live in a state of constant unknowingness, you would not be sleeping like shit.”

“Maybe I should move to China.”

“Maybe.”

“You got a place in China?”

“No.”

“That’s crazy. You’d think you’d have a castle by now, a place with a pool at the very minimum.”

“I’ve never been to China. Have you ever not paid me?”

“Never.”

“Good. You got me worried.”

“I start today. On account of all the bullshit you’ve been giving me without a fixed domicile in China.”

“Anna.”

“What?”

“Leave the kid alone.”

“Why?”

“He’s fixing to fuck you up real good.”

S
ummer ripened slowly. First the ground hardened, next the wind died and the sage, dormant throughout spring, came to life with a whisper and a smell to it. Anna took Eva and Paco to the river every day, and the two took turns jumping in and out with sticks in their mouths.

The great river. The strong river of the north. Anna had looked it up when she first moved. To the Apaches it was
Kotsoi,
the Great Waters. For the Tewas it was
Posoge,
the Big River. Only the Navajos, the vanquished lords of what was once a nation, called it something else entirely. To them it was the
Tooh Ba’aadii,
the Female River, because it flowed south, a feminine direction, and no name seemed to Anna more intuitively attuned to the nature of a waterway that cuts canyons, threads basins, finds its way to the sea, with barely a whisper.

At the water’s edge, the earth behind them dreamed itself into root and bark. Anna offered her face to the sun and gave silent thanks. The tempest raised by the boy had passed, almost forgotten now. She’d run into Richard Strand at the food store one afternoon.

“Come to dinner,” he said.

“Who’s coming?”

He waved a casual hand. “Kids, a couple pals, the usual. I haven’t seen you in a while.”

She looked around her. “We’re always here. How come we’re always here?”

Richard Strand had considered the question neutrally. “We’re buying food.”

“I know. But it’s like we’re enslaved. We’re always here, with our little carts, running into each other, buying food.”

“You get all worked up. Why do you get all worked up?”

“I’m not worked up.”

“Come for dinner.”

“No.”

Richard Strand’s eyebrows had shot up.

“No?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“I’ve got a friend in the hospital.” And she’d taken off, leaving Richard Strand standing, jaw a little slack, in the cheese section.

Since then, life had lost its sting. Esperanza’s transmission had died a sudden death and Anna had gone around to the shop. “Three thousand dollars,” she’d told Esperanza that evening, handing her the bill. Esperanza had slapped a hand on her mouth.

“Ohi, mi madre!”

“
Ohi, mi madre
is right,” Anna had said; and so for now, until Esperanza worked off her debt, there were three of them in the house: Anna in her study pushing words around the junkyard of her mind, Esperanza and Eva eating popcorn on the couch.

The two were thick as thieves. “Mom,” Eva called out the day Esperanza moved in, “you need to get Espi Jenny Craig!”

In her study, Anna pressed save on her computer once more.

“What’s Jenny Craig?”

“Diet meals!” Esperanza shouted. “It’s how Mary Martinez got skinny! She was big, no? And now she’s wearing skinny jeans!”

“You owe me three thousand bucks, Esperanza.”

“But I’m here, no? I’m working!”

“Three thousand, Espi.”

“Eee, your mother is hard, but I’m a sure thing, right, Eva? I’m a sure thing,” and Eva, whose wrists were like popsicle sticks, yelled out, “I want Jenny Craig, too!”

At her desk a few days later, in the same agony of silence, of failure, of new and old beginnings, Anna saw Esperanza’s head pop in through the opened door. “We’re going to Sonic.”

“What’s Sonic?”

“The slushy place!” a small voice shouted from behind the door. “No slushes,” Anna said, and a couple hours later there was half a Frito pie and two empty bucketfuls of orange slush in the trash.

None of it, however expertly orchestrated, prevented Espi from getting it in the neck.

“Espi.”

“Yes,
mijita
.”

“Your eyes are always red.”

“Eee, I know! What can I do? I don’t know what to do! I’m always putting this stuff in!” And Esperanza pulled out a bottle of maximum-strength Visine—pure bleach by the look of it—and waved it in the air with clear animosity. “And it’s expensive! Five dollars a bottle. Six with tax! And it lasts me a week!”

“Espi?”

“Yes?”

“Why are your eyes always red?”

“Don’t ask me! Ask my mother! It’s how I was born!”

“You were born with red eyes?”

Espi, whose crimson sclera were the result of prodigious beer drinking after Eva went to bed, cast a furtive glance in Anna’s direction.

“Eva, go do your homework.”

“I don’t have any homework.”

“Go do something.”

“Like what?”

“Go run around outside. Take Paco with you.”

“Paco’s tired,” Eva said as the Lab, having perceived a summons and sensed the possibility of some retrieving, stood salivating by her leg.

“Paco is not tired. Paco is dying to go.”

Eva took Paco’s head in her small hands. “You’re tired, aren’t you? Aren’t you, Paco?” and the dog, spiritually attuned to the child in a way Anna had always found miraculous, lay down and let his head rest on her feet.

Down by the river, afternoons, she and Eva played games. Eva put a fishnet bag over Paco’s head and they took bets on how long it would take him to paw it off. The dog became a regular Houdini, extricating himself with increasing economy of movement in preparation for some great vanishing act that would teach them both a lesson.

In the falling light, as the river went from silver to jade, they wrote words on each other’s backs and had to guess. Looking at a book, they tightened knots along a piece of rope, undid them, learned how they went from memory over and over again. On an old tree trunk, feet off the ground, Eva was the captain, Anna the sailor.

“‘O Captain! my Captain!’ Where to?”

“The Galapagos! Barbados! Neptune! Jupiter! Orion!”

And next, Anna would intone, “‘I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe. Warships on fire off the shoulder of Orion…’” and Eva, who had never seen
Blade Runner
but had memorized the speech, would almost always cut in.

“Mamma.”

“What?”

“It’s ‘attack ships,’ not ‘warships.’”

“‘Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched b-beams shine in the dark near the Tannhäuser Gate . . .’”

“Mamma.”

“What?”

“It’s ‘c-beams,’ not ‘b-beams.’”

“Since when?”

“Since the movie.”

“‘I watched c-beams shine . . .’”

“It’s ‘glitter.’ Not ‘shine.’”

They unraveled time, simply by lying there, under the great sky.

“What’s your first memory?” Eva asked one day as a pale quarter moon rose over the canyon.

“I don’t know.”

“Everyone has a first memory.”

“I don’t know.”

“Mamma.”

“I’m serious, I don’t know. What’s yours?”

“You covered in blood. And dust. You covered in blood and dust.”

On this cracked land at the northern end of the desert, much had been forgotten, much cast aside. Anna propped herself on her elbows, jolted into memory. It seemed like another life, the day she’d climbed barefoot and drunk on a dirt bike in the African bush and set out, cursing, for something she had no chance of finding—not in the cold, cold shadow of Eva’s father. Hours later, when she’d finally found her way back, shaking from the trauma of a fractured shoulder and badly lacerated skin, he had looked her over and picked up the car keys on his way out. He’d resurfaced three days later.

“Get out,” she’d said.

“I told you not to get on that bike.”

“I said, get out.”

“I told you.”

“What are you after? A prize for telling me?”

“I can’t do this anymore.”

“Nobody is asking you to.”

“Anna.”

“Nobody’s asking you shit.”

Now, behind mother and daughter, the river flowed thick and slow to the Mexican border. Walls of basalt rose on either side, intricately cracked, split deep from top to bottom.

“Where were you?” asked Anna.

“At the door when you came in.”

“With Lynette?”

“Yes.”

“I didn’t see you.”

“It’s okay.”

“I’m so sorry.”

“It’s okay.”

“No it’s not okay. It’s fucked up.”

“Mamma.”

“What?”

“You have to stop swearing.”

Back at home, Esperanza had the cleaning channel on and a list, queasily committed to paper, of wipes and mops and degreasers and polishes Anna had to get for her at the store the next day. Anna made dinner, and in the simple lowering of food to the table, in the plain offering of victuals, found unimaginable release, a stillness close to peace. Esperanza poked at her zucchini, ignored all lettuce, grew faint at the sight of chard, and typically lasted no more than half an hour before heading out to Sonic.

“I want to go with Espi!” Eva screamed when Espi got up from the table.

“Eat your dinner.”

“But I want to go with Espi!”

Esperanza had one foot out the door—cigarette dangling off the corner of her mouth, lighter held aloft already. “Do what your mother tells you,” she said.

“But I want a slushy!”

“Do what your mother tells you,” Esperanza said and pulled the door shut.

That night, in bed, Eva added a third prayer to her list.

“Dear God and all the angels,” she said, holding her mother’s hand in hers. “Please help Mamma not to swear.”

When Esperanza came back, three hours later, she stank of booze and cigarette smoke. She gestured Anna to the door.

“Is Eva in bed?”

“She is,” said Anna.

“Good. I don’t want her seeing me like this.”

It was summer. Things were fast forgotten, soon forgiven. Esperanza instructed Eva in the art of cop interception through some listening device purchased from a drug dealer in Espanola and strove to impress upon them both the futility of geometry.

“What is she going to do with the area of a square when she grows up?”

“Espi,” said Eva, looking up from her math workbook.

“Yes,
mijita?
”

“It’s a rhombus.”

“Eee, that’s even worse! They should be teaching her how to make money on that thing in New York, no? What’s it called, Anna, that thing in New York?”

“The Stock Exchange.”

“The Stock Exchange. So she doesn’t end up like me, living in someone’s house, mopping their floors, doing their laundry, because she can’t afford a transmission, no?”

“Espi,” Eva said, peering up out of grave eyes. “The reason you never have any money is because you gamble.”

Esperanza picked up a rag and shook it out.
“Hija,”
she said, “I have never gambled in my life.”

Eva approached her mother obliquely a few days later in the kitchen, clearly intending to part with a piece of information of some significance. “Mamma,” she whispered, “Espi has a Taser! A pink Taser!”

“Why does Espi have a Taser?”

“I don’t know!” said Eva, her eyes cutting about the room.

“Esperanza,” said Anna that night over dinner, “why do you have a Taser?”

“Eee!” said Esperanza. “Because you never know!”

“Never know what?”

“Who could be there!”

“There where?”

“Anywhere!” Esperanza said, getting up with her plate. She only approached Anna after the girl had fallen asleep. “I got it for Eva,” she whispered, “for when she turns nine.”

It was summer, there were no more mad dashes out the door in the morning, no shrill recriminations with the dog cowering in the back of the truck. Time softened, lengthened, grew more lenient. Eva sat her mother down at the dinner table with paper and pencil. “Do you remember the old house when we had to build the fence for Paco?”

Anna nodded, thankful those days were gone. She’d turned into a taxi service then, taking phone calls at all hours of the day and night from people whose greeting was, “Hi, you don’t know me but I have your dog . . .” She’d shown up at various residences with smoke coming out of her ears, determined to give the dog a beating, only to have him greet her with such wild abandon she lowered the tailgate of her truck without a word of censure and watched him leap, a great smile on his face, onto the back of the truck and, there, resume position as unrewarded navigator. She had picked a house with a fenced yard after that, and the dog, nicknamed by those who knew him The Forlorn Paquito, became even more forlorn.

“Yes, I remember perfectly.”

“You remember the fence?”

“No.”

“It was made of metal.”

“I remember metal.”

“It’s what we’re going to get for the chickens.”

“What chickens?”

“The chickens we’re going to get.”

The difference between them: Anna had never felt the slightest connection to the ground, not once had she experienced the urge to sink something into it and watch it grow. The mere idea of chickens made her queasy; the duty of recycling or, God forbid, composting, was one that belonged to others, yet her daughter had directed countless campaigns for a vegetable garden, had commandeered their vehicle repeatedly to the recycling plant, and had emerged from various chicken coops owned by friends holding not one, not two, but
three
sharp-beaked, crazy-eyed things lovingly in her arms, as if they were puppies.

“Chickens stink,” Anna said.

“But Mamma . . .”

“They stink,” Anna said.

Summer carries with it both mutiny and slumber. The heat swallows hours, entire midsections of the day, but beneath all that something always stirs, something always pulls, a kind of anarchy just below the skin, something to do with the body—what the body might want, what the body might get, should the heat hold.

On one end of town, not far from an abandoned mill, a marquee went up for the Croquet Party, a seasonal extravaganza sponsored by a few good families on a single premise: that everyone wear white. Eva agreed to a white T-shirt over white tennis shorts. After standing in front of the closet for a long time, Anna pulled out a short thing with a zipper down the back.

Ree called. “What are you wearing?”

“A short dress.”

“How short?”

“Roughly ten centimeters above the knee.”

“I don’t do centimeters.”

“I don’t do inches.”