Woman Hollering Creek (13 page)

And that’s how I fell asleep, with the TV on and every light in the house burning. When I woke up it was something like three in the morning. I shut the lights and TV and went to get some aspirin, and the cats, who’d been asleep with me on the couch, got up too and followed me into the bathroom as if they knew what’s what. And then they followed me into bed, where they aren’t allowed, but this time I just let them, fleas and all.

This happened, too. I swear I’m not making this up. It’s all true. It was the last time I was going to be with your father. We had agreed. All for the best. Surely I could see that, couldn’t I? My own good. A good sport. A young girl like me. Hadn’t I understood … responsibilities. Besides, he could
never
marry
me
. You didn’t think…?
Never marry a Mexican. Never marry a Mexican
 … No, of course not. I see. I see.

We had the house to ourselves for a few days, who knows how. You and your mother had gone somewhere. Was it Christmas? I don’t remember.

I remember the leaded-glass lamp with the milk glass above the dining-room table. I made a mental inventory of everything. The Egyptian lotus design on the hinges of the doors. The narrow, dark hall where your father and I had made love once. The four-clawed tub where he had washed my hair and rinsed it with a tin bowl. This window. That counter. The bedroom with its light in the morning, incredibly soft, like the light from a polished dime.

The house was immaculate, as always, not a stray hair anywhere, not a flake of dandruff or a crumpled towel. Even the roses on the dining-room table held their breath. A kind of airless cleanliness that always made me want to sneeze.

Why was I so curious about this woman he lived with? Every time I went to the bathroom, I found myself opening the medicine cabinet, looking at all the things that were hers. Her Estée Lauder lipsticks. Corals and pinks, of course. Her nail polishes—mauve was as brave as she could wear. Her cotton balls and blond hairpins. A pair of bone-colored sheepskin slippers, as clean as the day she’d bought them. On the door hook—a white robe with a
MADE IN ITALY
label, and a silky nightshirt with pearl buttons. I touched the fabrics.
Calidad
. Quality.

I don’t know how to explain what I did next. While your father was busy in the kitchen, I went over to where I’d left my backpack, and took out a bag of gummy bears I’d bought. And while he was banging pots, I went around the house and left a trail of them in places I was sure
she
would find them. One in her lucite makeup organizer. One stuffed inside each bottle of nail polish. I untwisted the expensive lipsticks to their full length and smushed a bear on the top before recapping them. I even put a gummy bear in her diaphragm case in the very center of that luminescent rubber moon.

Why bother? Drew could take the blame. Or he could say it was the cleaning woman’s Mexican voodoo. I knew that, too. It didn’t matter. I got a strange satisfaction wandering about the house leaving them in places only she would look.

And just as Drew was shouting, “Dinner!” I saw it on the desk. One of those wooden babushka dolls Drew had brought her from his trip to Russia. I know. He’d bought one just like it for me.

I just did what I did, uncapped the doll inside a doll inside a doll, until I got to the very center, the tiniest baby inside all the others, and this I replaced with a gummy bear. And then I put the
dolls back, just like I’d found them, one inside the other, inside the other. Except for the baby, which I put inside my pocket. All through dinner I kept reaching in the pocket of my jean jacket. When I touched it, it made me feel good.

On the way home, on the bridge over the
arroyo
on Guadalupe Street, I stopped the car, switched on the emergency blinkers, got out, and dropped the wooden toy into that muddy creek where winos piss and rats swim. The Barbie doll’s toy stewing there in that muck. It gave me a feeling like nothing before and since.

Then I drove home and slept like the dead.

These mornings, I fix coffee for me, milk for the boy. I think of that woman, and I can’t see a trace of my lover in this boy, as if she conceived him by immaculate conception.

I sleep with this boy, their son. To make the boy love me the way I love his father. To make him want me, hunger, twist in his sleep, as if he’d swallowed glass. I put him in my mouth. Here, little piece of my
corazón
. Boy with hard thighs and just a bit of down and a small hard downy ass like his father’s, and that back like a valentine. Come here,
mi cariñito
. Come to
mamita
. Here’s a bit of toast.

I can tell from the way he looks at me, I have him in my power. Come, sparrow. I have the patience of eternity. Come to
mamita
. My stupid little bird. I don’t move. I don’t startle him. I let him nibble. All, all for you. Rub his belly. Stroke him. Before I snap my teeth.

What is it inside me that makes me so crazy at 2
A.M.
? I can’t blame it on alcohol in my blood when there isn’t any. It’s something worse. Something that poisons the blood and tips me when the
night swells and I feel as if the whole sky were leaning against my brain.

And if I killed someone on a night like this? And if it was
me
I killed instead, I’d be guilty of getting in the line of crossfire, innocent bystander, isn’t it a shame. I’d be walking with my head full of images and my back to the guilty. Suicide? I couldn’t say. I didn’t see it.

Except it’s not me who I want to kill. When the gravity of the planets is just right, it all tilts and upsets the visible balance. And that’s when it wants to out from my eyes. That’s when I get on the telephone, dangerous as a terrorist. There’s nothing to do but let it come.

So. What do you think? Are you convinced now I’m as crazy as a tulip or a taxi? As vagrant as a cloud?

Sometimes the sky is so big and I feel so little at night. That’s the problem with being cloud. The sky is so terribly big. Why is it worse at night, when I have such an urge to communicate and no language with which to form the words? Only colors. Pictures. And you know what I have to say isn’t always pleasant.

Oh, love, there. I’ve gone and done it. What good is it? Good or bad, I’ve done what I had to do and needed to. And you’ve answered the phone, and startled me away like a bird. And now you’re probably swearing under your breath and going back to sleep, with that wife beside you, warm, radiating her own heat, alive under the flannel and down and smelling a bit like milk and hand cream, and that smell familiar and dear to you, oh.

Human beings pass me on the street, and I want to reach out and strum them as if they were guitars. Sometimes all humanity strikes me as lovely. I just want to reach out and stroke someone, and say There, there, it’s all right, honey. There, there, there.

Bread
 

We were hungry. We went into a bakery on Grand Avenue and bought bread. Filled the backseat. The whole car smelled of bread. Big sourdough loaves shaped like a fat ass. Fat-ass bread, I said in Spanish,
Nalgona
bread. Fat-ass bread, he said in Italian, but I forget how he said it.

We ripped big chunks with our hands and ate. The car a pearl blue like my heart that afternoon. Smell of warm bread, bread in both fists, a tango on the tape player loud, loud, loud, because me and him, we’re the only ones who can stand it like that, like if the bandoneón, violin, piano, guitar, bass, were inside us, like when he wasn’t married, like before his kids, like if all the pain hadn’t passed between us.

Driving down streets with buildings that remind him, he says, how charming this city is. And me remembering when I was little, a cousin’s baby who died from swallowing rat poison in a building like these.

That’s just how it is. And that’s how we drove. With all his new city memories and all my old. Him kissing me between big bites of bread.

Eyes of Zapata
 

I put my nose to your eyelashes. The skin of the eyelids as soft as the skin of the penis, the collarbone with its fluted wings, the purple knot of the nipple, the dark, blue-black color of your sex, the thin legs and long thin feet. For a moment I don’t want to think of your past nor your future. For now you are here, you are mine.

Would it be right to tell you what I do each night you sleep here? After your cognac and cigar, after I’m certain you’re asleep, I examine at my leisure your black trousers with the silver buttons—fifty-six pairs on each side; I’ve counted them—your embroidered sombrero with its horsehair tassel, the lovely Dutch linen shirt, the fine braid stitching on the border of your
charro
jacket, the-handsome black boots, your tooled gun belt and silver spurs. Are you my general? Or only that boy I met at the country fair in San Lázaro?

Hands too pretty for a man. Elegant hands, graceful hands, fingers smelling sweet as your Havanas. I had pretty hands once, remember? You used to say I had the prettiest hands of any woman
in Cuautla.
Exquisitas
you called them, as if they were something to eat. It still makes me laugh remembering that.