Part 15 (1/2)

Marketa Winthrop had snapped her gum and taken a drag on her Kool and said, ”Hun, that's about ninety-eight percent of your problem right there.” Then she'd sent Sheila off to the 7-Eleven for more donuts.

Ahead, just off the unnamed freeway, Whispering Pines Junior High looks to Sheila like the sort of building where secret plans are hatched to a.s.sa.s.sinate third world leaders. Beige trapezoids of white-stuccoed concrete, no windows, sit in the middle of parking lots, which sit in the middle of bulldozed fields, which back up against farms, which still have cattle grazing in the field. No pines can be seen, and nothing and no one here whispers about anything. When they'd come to register, Sheila and Briggs had been escorted on a tour by a helmet-haired woman who was advancing her career in public education by spouting phrases such as ”child-centered” and ”high tech, high touch, and high teach.” The woman was well put together for a school person, but around her eyes she had applied her makeup in a way that indicated to Sheila that at some point she had lived at least a marginally wild life. Did she ever imagine, back on those nights, haunting the bar at the TGI Fridays, that she'd be spending the rest of her life escorting herds of mothers and their sullen offspring on tours of a public school? Her junior tour guide had been one of those student council treasurer types, with a little too much enthusiasm for Sheila's taste.

”This is where we eat lunch. It's really neat. That's the library. It's really neat.” Everything had been ”neat,” not just all the cla.s.ses and teachers but also the girl's fingernails and hair and brand-name sweats.h.i.+rt. She was the sort of girl that Sheila and her friends would have backed into a stall in the girls' bathroom and glowered at until she broke down in tears.

The former wild liver had described Whispering Pines as the Triple A+ Magnet School of the Future.

”Your children can take Aikido, Mountaineering, Reader's Theater, Cooking with Math. It's a rich and dynamic environment.”

Did they have any regular cla.s.ses here, anything resembling literature or history? These were the sorts of questions that Sheila had wanted to ask, but the whole business of finding a place to live after the divorce and a school for her son had numbed her into silence. She had discovered that in the years she had been out of circulation, the leasing offices and schools had replaced all the people who used to answer questions-simple questions such as where's the laundry room and does this school have bus service-with well-groomed robots who only knew the words memorized from scripts. If you interrupted them, they had to go back to the beginning of the tape.

”Your child will absolutely love it here,” Helmet Hair had said, and for the most part Briggs did love it, but then Briggs could make friends anywhere. He'd probably win the congeniality award on death row, which is the place these people would like her to believe he was headed.

She should have known this was the wrong school. Too much perkiness in the hallways. Too many straight white teeth in too many expensive outfits. Too many Jennifers and Heathers and Jacobs and Sams. She'd had to resign from the Whispering Pines PTA after one too many conversations with parents who'd already put down deposits on their childrens' Ivy League educations. What do you have planned for Briggs? they'd asked. ”I was kind of hoping he'd impregnate your daughter Brittany and move into your house,” she'd thought. Sometimes Sheila wants the b.u.mper sticker on her Neon to read ”My C Student Kicked Your Honor Roll Student's Wimpy a.s.s.”

Thank G.o.d Briggs was resilient. These Whispering Pines people could stamp their d.a.m.n cookie cutters on him all they wanted and Briggs would still be Briggs, at least that's what she hoped. But didn't resilience wear down? Wasn't it like the rustproofing on your car? A year of rain, fine, but five years and all warranties were off.

She eyes him there in the seat beside her. Head nodding gently to some tune in his head, oblivious, whistling-against fear perhaps, but it was hard to say with Briggs. He had never been the whistle in the dark type. All Briggs knew of the hard streets he'd learned from the make-believe videos on MTV. d.a.m.n cute, silly, silly boy. He really believed he was the life of the party, everybody's best friend. He didn't even have a clue as to how much trouble he was in.

The point of all of this, of course, was to raise them up and send them off into the world, into their own happy families and into fabulous careers of their choosing, but thinking of this only causes Sheila shudders. Frankly, she was barely employable herself. Twelve years of diapers, volunteering at school, cooking nutritious meals, and then, just like that, she'd been out on the street. And while child support looked good on paper, she wasn't about to rely on regular checks from a man who couldn't figure out to at least take a cat bath before leaving some wh.o.r.e's motel room.

Publisher's personal a.s.sistant: that seemed like a glamorous enough position. On the days Sheila feels great she even believes that she is the glue that holds her office together. Most days, however, she knows this is hubris-a good former English major word. For the most part Sheila gets paid for returning clogged nail polish and to shop around for humane poodle groomers.

Even so, despite spending her days with a woman who believed it was a good idea to wear cruise wear to the office everyday, Sheila knew that there were many worse jobs. Winthrop and Rolle left plenty of time to make another plan and for her, as of late, weekly visits to Whispering Pines Junior High. The only really bad part were the hourly trips to the 7-Eleven. It had occurred to her only last week that the Pakistani man behind the counter believed that she herself consumed the mountains of junk food she hauled out of there each day.

”Not for me,” she'd shouted last week, waving her hand over an a.s.sortment of Ding Dongs and packaged nuts.

”Very good, very good,” he'd said. At the time she'd thought it polite, now she believes it's the Pakistani version of ”Whatever.”

That could be Briggs, she thinks. My son, spending his life trapped behind the counter of the convenience store, bagging up junk food for lying binge eaters.

She pulls into the visitor's parking s.p.a.ce by the front entrance.

”Sorry I'm so bad,” Briggs says.

Something in Sheila's chest does a somersault. She feels herself filling up with that sensation she remembers so well from when Briggs was an infant. She would get this way when someone, usually an older woman, would lean over the carriage and cluck over her adorable child.

”Yes, he is precious,” she'd concur, despite his being covered at the time with chunky yellow bits of gummed Zwieback. She'd always found this emotion unnamable. What would you call it? It wasn't pride and it was something other than love. It was a kind of ecstasy, and mixed in with that the absolute conviction that if anyone so much as plucked a hair from her angel's head, she'd hunt the barbarian to the ends of the Earth and peel him alive with a dull vegetable knife.

The parking lot bustles with her fellow happy strivers, picking up their children for the orthodontist or delivering them from the pediatrician. s.h.i.+ny, bright faces of the kind that Ralph pasted into ads suggesting ”Your Child Can Be a Model!” Antiseptic and crisply pink, the children in those ads, you'd order them out of the catalog, you really would. Call in your Visa number and receive in the mail one perfect blank slate, ready to mold to order. Operators are standing by.

No, honey, she thinks, you're not bad.

Tomorrow Sheila will take some personal time and drive all over this G.o.d forsaken wilderness and find some sort of school that makes sense for her child. She will take the whole day, the rest of her life if she has to. Later today she will make sure the little stud in the seat beside her understands that he has gotten on her last good nerve, that he's not anywhere near as funny and cute as they both know that he is, and-on the off chance he thinks she's playing-that she has a list of junior service academies that will permanently erase that smirk right off his handsome brown face.

For now though she leans over to her son and hooks a fingernail beneath his chin. ”Listen up, Al Capone,” she says. ”We're going in there and we're going with version two. Tell it so even I believe it's true.”

FROM Song of the Water Saints.

BY NELLY ROSARIO.

INVASIONS * 1916.

SANTO DOMINGO, REPuBLICA DOMINICANA.

Graciela and Silvio stood hand in hand on El Malecon, sea breeze polis.h.i.+ng their faces. Silvio hurled stones out to the waves and Graciela bunched up her skirt to search for more pebbles. Her knees were ashy and she wore her spongy hair in four knots. A rusty lard can filled with pigeon peas, label long worn from trips to the market, was by her feet. Silvio's straw hat was in Graciela's hands, and quickly, she turned to toss it to the water. The hat fluttered like a hungry seagull, then was lapped up by foam. Silvio's kiss pinned Graciela against the railing.

It was a hazy day. The hot kissing made Graciela squint against the silver light. Beyond her lashes, Silvio was a sepia prince.

-That yanqui over there's lookin' at us, he murmured into Graciela's mouth. He pulled out his hand from the rip in her skirt. Graciela turned to see a pink man standing a few yards away from them. She noticed that the yanqui wore a hat and a vest-he surely did not seem to be a Marine. When she was with Silvio, Graciela forgot to worry about anyone telling on her to Mai and Pai, much less panic over yanquis and their Marine boots sc.r.a.ping the cobble-stones of the Colonial Quarter.

Pa.s.sion burned stronger than fear. Graciela turned back to Silvio.

-Forget him. Her pelvis dug into his until she felt iron.

Graciela and Silvio were too lost in their tangle of tongues to care that a few yards away, the yanqui was glad for a brief break from the brutal sun that tormented his skin. With her tongue tracing Silvio's neck, Graciela couldn't care less that Theodore Roosevelt's ”soft voice and big stick” on Latin America had dipped the yanqui the furthest south he had ever been from New York City. Silvio's hands crawled back into the rip in Graciela's skirt; she would not blush if she learned that the yanqui spying on them had already photographed the Marines stationed on her side of the island, who were there to ”order and pacify,” in all their debauchery; that dozens of her fellow Dominicans somberly populated the yanqui's photo negatives; and that the lush Dominican landscape had left marks on the legs of his tripod. Of no interest to a moaning Graciela were the picaresque postcard views that the yanqui planned on selling in New York and, he hoped, in France and Germany. And having always been poor and anonymous herself, Graciela would certainly not pity the yanqui because his still lifes, nature shots, images of battles.h.i.+ps for the newspapers had not won him big money or recognition.

-Forget the G.o.dd.a.m.ned yanqui, I said. Graciela squeezed Silvio's arm when his lips broke suction with hers.

-He's comin' over here, Silvio said. He turned away from Graciela to hide his erection against the seawall. Graciela watched the man approach them. He had a slight limp. Up close, she could see that his skin was indeed pink and his hair was a deep shade of orange. Graciela had never seen a real yanqui up close. She smiled and folded her skirt so that the rip disappeared.

The man pulled a handkerchief from his vest pocket and wiped his neck. He cleared his throat and held out his right hand, first to Silvio, then to Graciela. His handshake swallowed up Graciela's wrist, but she shook just as hard. In cornhashed Spanish the man introduced himself: Peter West, he was.

Peter. Silvio. Graciela. They were all happy to meet each other. The man leaned against the seawall and pulled out a wad of pesos from a pocket in his outer jacket. His eyes never left Graciela and Silvio.

-So, are you with the Marines? Silvio asked in an octave lower than usual, and Graciela had to smile secretly because her sepia prince was not yet old enough to wear long pants.

The yanqui shook his head.

-No, no, he said with an air of importance. His thumb and index finger formed a circle around his right eye. Graciela looked over at Silvio. They wrinkled their noses. Then more cornhashed Spanish.

With the help of a Galician vendor, Peter West explained, he had acc.u.mulated an especially piquant series of photographs: brothel quadroons bathed in feathers, a Negro chambermaid naked to the waist, and, of course, he remembered with the silliest grin Graciela had ever seen, the drunken sailors with the sow. In fact, the sun was not so mean to him when he wore his hat and jacket. And fruit was sweet, wh.o.r.es were cheap.

Graciela reached for the pesos before Silvio did; after all, Peter West had thrust them in her direction when he finished his convoluted explanations. But he quickly pulled the pesos away, leaving Graciela's fingers splayed open.

With the promise of pesos, Graciela and Silvio found themselves in the Galician vendor's warehouse, where Peter West had staged many ribald acts among its sacks of rice. How happy they had been to help this yanqui-man push together the papier-mache trees, to roll out the starched canvas of cracked land and sky. Silvio straddled the tiger with its frozen growl while Graciela pried open the legs of a broken tripod to look in its middle. When West lit the lamps Graciela and Silvio squealed.

-Look, look how he brought the sun in here!

Silvio shaded his eyes.

-This yanqui-man, he is a crazy.

Graciela's whisper rippled through the warehouse when the fantasy soured. The pink hand tugged at her skirt and pointed briskly to Silvio's pants. They turned to each other as the same hand dangled pesos before them.