• • •
T
hat night the doorbell buzzes, and Manny looks over his lineup before opening the door. Darla is nowhere to be found. He last saw her on the couch with Michele, who’s missing, too. Manny does not open the door. Instead, he leaves the other girls standing there and finds Gladys in her office. She sits with headphones to her ears, half smiling, her mouth hanging loosely open. The light of Darla’s fifth wheel glows on the switchboard. “Young love,” says Gladys.
The doorbell buzzes again. “Come
on
, Manny,” calls Amy from the lobby. “Let’s get this show on the road.”
Manny motions to Gladys. With the same reluctance with which she pauses her tape of the previous day’s
General Hospital
to log cash, Gladys takes the headphones off and stretches them over Manny’s head, nestling the coarse black foam over his small ears. Darla’s voice comes through the crackle and fuzz of the old intercom.
“You don’t have the fucking Academy Awards in Italy? That’s crazy. I love the Academy Awards. Ask me a year.”
“I don’t, ah . . .”
“A year, a year. Ask me. Go on.” A game she plays with all of them.
“Nineteen ah, seventy . . . four?”
“
Godfather II
.” A pause. Manny pictures Michele’s smooth, perpetually puzzled face. “That’s what won Best Picture that year. Ask me another.”
“Okay. Nineteen ninety . . . one?”
“Easy.
Silence of the Lambs
. Too easy, none from the nineties.”
“Nineteen fifty-two?”
“That would be . . .
The Greatest Show on Earth
. DeMille.”
“Nineteen thirty-eight?”
“You Can’t Take It With You
. Fucking classic Capra.
Funny. Sad. Optimistic. One of my favorites.”
“You are very good.”
She can do Best Actor and Best Actress, too. The boy wouldn’t know the difference if she were making them up, but she’s not. She can list them all, every single year, forward and backward, which she does, she says, in her head when she’s standing in the lineup or straddling a new client or lying in bed trying to sleep, listening to the shrieks of the peacocks chasing one another around the coop.
There’s a faint rustling sound in the headphones. Manny hears Darla gasp, then say, “Shit, Mikey, where’d you get that?”
“They gave it to me, to live, to wait for Renzo.”
“How much do you have?” The intercom crackles.
“I am not sure. Here.” A longer pause. The doorbell buzzes again.
“There must be nine, ten grand here. What—”
The connection fizzles, submerging Darla’s voice in static. Manny shakes the cord furiously. He presses the headset to his ears so hard they sting. When the connection returns Michele is saying, “Come, ah, with me. To Italy.”
Manny presses his hand to his heart. That stupid boy.
The doorbell buzzes, long and loud, and for a moment it is all Manny can hear.
“I will come tomorrow,” Michele says. “And we will go.” Dumb, big-eyed Michele. “We, ah, fly home,” he is saying. “Tomorrow.”
Before she can answer, Manny presses the speaker button. “Darla,” he says. “The lineup. Now.”
When Manny finally opens the door, the chunky man who’s been buzzing spins his keys on his index finger and steps inside, tonguing a monstrous divot of tobacco down in his bottom lip. He picks Darla, though she barely bothers to look at him. What did Manny expect? Michele, this fat fuck, they’re all the same, stumbling in from the middle of nowhere, trying to fill the empty space in them with her.
In the morning, after feeding the peacocks, Manny says a little prayer and then steps into Darla’s room, where she’s watching a black-and-white movie. She motions him to her and they lie together on the twin bed, head to toe. He says, “What are we watching?”
“
You Were Never Lovelier
,” she says. “Fred Astaire. Rita Hayworth. It’s public access.”
Manny rests his cheek on the tops of her bony feet. Rita Hayworth spins through Buenos Aires, all sheen and tinsel. “Honey,” he says finally, “you really like this boy?”
Darla keeps her eyes on the screen. “Is that why you came in here?”
“He’s been through some shit.”
She shrugs. “Him and everyone else around here.” She shifts her feet under the blanket. “You know I love you, Manny. You’ve been hella good to me. But that boy is my ticket out of here.”
“Girl, this is for real. You’re gonna hurt somebody.”
“Hurt somebody? What happened to ‘Give ’em a little attention’? What happened to ‘Make them feel better than their girlfriends, better than their wives, better than they are’? You don’t have to touch these men, Manny. You don’t have to fuck their sorry asses. You sit out there stroking your goddamn peacocks, writing letters to Jim about what a good boy you’ve been, how much money you’ve made him, hoping he won’t die on you. You come inside to sign the paychecks, to tell me I might hurt somebody? Too late, old man. I been hurting them. And you taught me how.”
• • •
W
hen Michele leaves the La Quinta the next night, he leaves it for good, Renzo’s backpack laid out on his bed. Amy opens the door before he buzzes, and takes him to the bar. “Have a seat, baby. Budweiser?”
“Yes. Please.”
She puts a beer on a napkin and beside it sets a little shot glass filled to the top with brown liquor. “For courage,” she says. Michele drinks it and pats the bundles of twenty-dollar bills in the pockets of his cargo shorts. It’s all there, the Search & Rescue money from the teller machine, the two thousand dollars his parents wired him, his own money. Renzo’s money. He’s made up his mind. He can’t go back to Genoa. His flight leaves in the morning. He’ll buy a plane ticket for Darla. An engagement ring. Put a security deposit on an apartment in another city, away from his family. Away from Renzo’s friends. God, Renzo’s family. He feels his new life folded inside his pockets. Yes, a whole new life for nine thousand American dollars, he believes this. A new life with a woman there to busy his hands, to pour his drinks, to help him forget. A life where he came to America alone. Or not at all.
He waits. The night pulls on. He reaches around the bar for the tap and refills his own glass when he needs it. Men come and go around him, but each time the bell reverberates through the building it’s the old woman who opens the door for them. He waits for Darla, but she never comes. When he asks about her, none of the girls will answer him. His head is hot and clouded and his cab isn’t coming until morning. He doesn’t know what else to do. He walks outside through the dust and gravel to Darla’s fifth wheel and knocks on the door and then the windows. The lights are off but through the blinds he can see the paper-lined drawers of her dresser pulled half-open and empty, and the bed where he last saw her, stripped bare. He looks in the other trailers. He calls for her. There is no answer.
Somewhere in the night Amy comes and pours more shots. She lines them up on the bar like tiny monuments. They drink them together, one after another. “Where is she?” he says finally, a stinging in his voice.
She pours them another round. “Here.”
“Tell me.”
“I don’t know,” she says. “She was just gone. I swear.”
Near dawn, Manny appears from the darkness of the hallway and puts his hands on Michele’s shoulders. “Walk with me, honey.”
As he follows Manny out the back door, beyond the lights and sounds of the compound and into the desert, Michele looks to the sky. So this is what Renzo looked upon as he died, naked and faceup in the dirt: the wide brightening sky, the fading stars, the waning moon white like a jaw on the horizon. A peacock caws. A part of him—the part that speaks in a ghost’s voice—knows he’ll never see Darla again.
• • •
T
he peacock coop is shaded from the pink-purple of dawn by palm leaves and canvas overhead. The air is thick with the scents of seed and dust and bird.
The boy hesitates before coming inside. “These are, ah, your pets?”
“Not mine, my boss’s. I hear you’re headed out of town. You’re leaving.”
“Yes, I go back to Italy.”
“And you think you’re taking Darla with you.”
“She, ah, would like to leave. She has told me.” A bird rustles in its nest. “I, ah, like Darla.”
“I liked her, too,” says Manny.
“I love her.”
“Honey, I know. But she didn’t love you, okay?”
“She does,” he says, though he says it like a question.
“American girls, you don’t know how they are. All they care about is money, okay? Especially these girls. Don’t you know? It’s all business. Even with Darla.”
“Where is she?”
Manny combs his fingers through a trough of seeds, letting the breeze winnow away the empty shells. “Don’t worry about it.”
“Tell me where is she.”
“This is a business, kid. She had somewhere else to be.” There is a stillness pulled tight between them. Outside, dawn lightens the landscape but the last dregs of night linger in the coop. “They found your friend, didn’t they?”
Michele picks at the chicken wire. “Yes.” Then quickly, “No. They said he is dead. They stopped looking.”
He turns away and hooks his fingers through the chicken wire. His broad shoulders start to tremble. He begins to shake the entire wall of the coop back and forth, harder and harder, until Manny fears he might snap the old two-by-fours. The birds, startled from their roosts, squawk and dart around, frenzied, among them the bright albino flash of White Pine. All the while Michele wails, a feral, guttural sound.
“Fuck, kid,” says Manny, too quiet to be heard. “Come on.” He pulls Michele back and turns the boy to face him. Michele’s face is wet and slick where he’s bloodied his nose against the fence. Manny embraces him. The boy writhes at first, then goes limp and lets his head fall to Manny’s shoulder. He is sobbing.
“My boss, Jim,” Manny says, maybe just to have something to say. “The one who owns these birds? He’s dying, too. Half the time he doesn’t even know who I am. You think it’s not going to happen, and then. But these girls—”
“I, ah, have to take her,” Michele says, shrugging him off. “I love her.”
Manny takes Michele by his shoulders and turns him gently to face the yellow lights of the ranch in the distance. “Kid,” he says softly. “Look. There’s no love in there. Trust me.”
Manny lets his arms wrap around the boy’s waist and presses him close again, from behind. For a moment—just a moment—the birds are still and Manny feels warmth against him.
Michele wrenches away, shaking his head. “No—”
“She never cared about you,” says Manny, hot with want, walking toward the kid. Burning. Michele shoves him back, hard. The peacocks are screeching now, and flapping, but there’s nowhere for them to go. Manny comes at him still. “She didn’t. You’re a kid.” The boy tries to leave, groping drunk for the gate in the half-light. “A stupid, sad, foreign kid with a dead friend and too much money. That’s all you are, understand? I did you a favor.”
Later, Manny will say it happened quick—the swing so fast it was a blur, the boy all sweet inertia, a dervish, and the rake’s prongs just a flash. Then he left, waited for his cab on the side of the road and never came back. But in truth Manny sees everything slow. The boy’s arched back. The contours of his ribs through his T-shirt. The blood around his nose and mouth already maroon with coagulate. His triceps made taut by the weight of the tool. The swing misses Manny so wildly that he doesn’t even move his feet. Michele wrenches the rake’s metal teeth into White Pine’s chest.
For an instant the air is filled with the report of the sternum snapping. Michele’s never seen a bird like this. The snowy feathers redden as blood wells up around the prongs. He feels the give of the meat as he plies the rake from the bird’s breast. Its beak opens and closes, leaking the tight sorrowful cry of a baby, a cry that will come to mean America.
WISH YOU WERE HERE
I
t begins with a man and a woman. They are young, but not so young as they would like. They fall in love. They marry. They have a child. They buy an adobe house in a small town where all the houses are adobe. The McDonald’s is adobe. The young man is named Carter. Carter often points to the adobe McDonald’s as proof of what a good decision they made in moving away from the city. The woman, Marin, is also glad they’ve moved here, but she misses her friends, and the constant sound of city traffic whispering like the sea. She feels this little town tries too hard.
As soon as Carter and Marin learn they’ve conceived the child, they begin to argue about it. What will they feed it, what will they teach it, what of this world will they allow it to see? They fight about these things before the child is more than a wafer of cells. Before the child is anything, it is a catalyst for fights.
All the fights are the same fight: Carter wants to be sure Marin will change for their child. She has irresponsible habits. She eats poorly. She never exercises. She is terrible with money. She smokes and watches too much TV and gets bored easily and antagonizes people at parties.
Carter used to be fine with her habits. They were the things he once loved about her. Marin points this out, many times. She asks who it is he thinks he married. A child changes things, he says. A child is sacrifice. This is inarguable, and eventually she gives up arguing it. Each day he has a new stream of questions about what kind of mother she will be.
Does she plan on using disposable diapers?
Of course not.
Will she allow the child to watch television?
Only in small amounts. No. No. Not at all.
Will she use a microwave to heat the child’s food?
Never.
When he was a boy, Carter says, his family had a garden where they grew fresh fruits and vegetables. He’s told Marin about this garden, many times. The garden was monstrously fecund. His mother spent days and days in their basement, canning its yields. He wants to know, Will she garden? Will she can?
Of course, she says.
Why does she say this? She doesn’t know. She is not willing to can.
Marin never cooks. For dinner, she likes to make herself cereal or cheese and crackers or half an English muffin with mayonnaise and a microwaved egg on top. This is another thing that will have to change. Carter never cooks either, but this is not something that will have to change. Carter has seven brothers and sisters and when he was a boy, he says, his mother made them all a healthy, hot meal, every single night. She never used a microwave.
When he was a boy, Carter says, his family never ate out. He and Marin are always eating out. Their refrigerator is crammed with wire-handled Chinese takeout boxes and containers of pasta with the lids pinched on and Styrofoam clamshells of crab cakes and vegetable quesadillas and leftover restaurant steaks wrapped in aluminum foil. Marin pretends to be apologetic about these—it’s just that they’re so busy, she says. But she likes eating out. She is comforted by the choreography of a restaurant. And she likes to bring the leftover steaks to bed and gnaw on them, cold, while she watches TV.
A memory Marin often excavates during their arguments:
They’d been dating only three months when Carter asked her to meet his parents. It had just rained and the two of them were walking to the BART station, trading easy jokes about the terrible, bombastic movie they’d just seen. Carter stopped on the shining, still-wet sidewalk and took her hand. Come home with me, he said. She loved the urgency of the question, and how fearlessly he asked it.
The next morning they drove from San Francisco to Seattle, then continued north to a suburb of Seattle. It was his mother’s fiftieth birthday, and their visit was a surprise. When they arrived, Carter’s mother held Marin as though she were her own baby. His mother did not have a bank account, Marin learned. His mother did not have a driver’s license. She was cooking her own birthday dinner.
In the kitchen, Marin wanted to seem helpful. She opened the door of the pantry to reveal a wall of hand-canned fruits and vegetables. The stained-glass colors of tomatoes, yellow squash, zucchini and green beans. Carrot spears, halved beets, apricots, rings of apple. Small shriveled pickles and relish and a row of homogeneous dun-colored jams. Pearl onions like eyeballs.
In the pantry Marin said, I need some air. No one heard her.
She walked to the tennis courts across the street and smoked just a tiny bit of a stale joint she kept in her compact. Small white moths flitted silently in the halos of the court lights, and she watched these until she felt a little better. She returned to the house and over dinner she saw quite clearly that she was attending the birthday celebration of a fifty-year-old woman who had never had an orgasm.
On the long drive home, Marin sat silently with her anxieties, turning them over in her head. She had a tendency to be self-destructive, she knew. Before Carter, her life had been a string of beautiful, aloof men with names like the four legs of a very sturdy table. Even now she had the urge to call one of them up and see if he still knew his way around her. She could pass a whole day inflaming the listlessness inside her with erotic fantasies of men who, for the most part, had been unkind to her.
When was she going to grow up?
She looked at Carter. He smiled, bleary-eyed from the drive, and put his hand on the back of her neck. She was twenty-nine. He would be a good husband. A wonderful father. He loved her as though it had never occurred to him that he could feel otherwise. She wanted to be someone who deserved a love like that. She smiled back at him and cracked her window, feeling the stale air sucked from the rental car. She inhaled deeply, and when she exhaled she let her doubts slip out the window with her breath, littered them all along I-5.
Six months later, in April, Marin and Carter were married beneath a copse of papery crab-apple blossoms in Golden Gate Park. Carter had already found an impressive job in the progressive high desert town with the strict zoning laws. A place to raise a child. They bought their first car and hitched it to their moving truck and towed it out of California. Every hundred miles or so Marin asked Carter to pull over, and when he did she opened the door of the U-Haul and vomited on the side of the road.
They arrived in the adobe town and the questions began. Now Carter comes home from work and wants to know, what has she eaten today?
Has she exercised?
How much water has she drunk?
What is her temperature?
Did she nap?
In what position did she sleep?
I don’t want to talk about it, she sometimes says.
We have to talk about it, he says.
He’s right, she knows. They are going to have a child together. They have to talk about everything. They will always have to talk about everything.
The baby grows inside her. Carter brings home fruit and leafy greens and obscure whole grains Marin has never heard of. Before bed—when once he would have touched her—he leans down and speaks to her midsection. He insists on massaging her neck and feet, which do not bother her, and the knots running along either side of her spine, which do. Under his hands Marin cannot help but return to his mother’s pantry. Everycolor walls of foodstuff close in around her. White moths flit around the watty bulb dangling from the ceiling. How briefly her life was her own.
Then, when the child is born, something unexpected happens. Carter’s questions cease. Now the child has been here for eleven weeks and it is as though his points are moot. Or if not moot, then at least he does not raise them. She can tell he would like to—she can see their shadows traveling occasionally across his face—but he does not. Perhaps he finally loves her for who she is. Perhaps he sees that she is trying. Perhaps he is as tired as she is.
The weeks since the child was born have been exhausting but rewarding, too. The child lifts its head. He smiles. He sleeps on his father’s chest. Marin takes photos. The child will want to see this someday.
This weekend they are taking their first trip as a family, meeting up with married friends from the city to go camping at Lake Tahoe. On the plane the baby sleeps and Carter sleeps and in this peace Marin thinks for the first time how good it will feel to see these old friends from when they were young. She opens the in-flight magazine and there in the center spread are photos of the lake and captions which compare its waters to precious gems. Emerald. Sapphire. Aquamarine. She can see them there on the white ring of shore. Val. Jake. Old friends from before the child. How she’s looked forward to sitting beside them on the shore of the largest alpine lake in North America.
They meet their friends at the campsite. Val and Jake have children of their own. They also have a dog. The children are four and six. The dog is a reddish color, a copper retriever. The group goes down to the water: Carter and Marin, Val and Jake, the children, the infant and the dog.
The beach is rockier than Marin would have liked, but the water is clearer than she could have imagined. Val and Carter swim with the children. Carter makes a spirited effort to teach the boy the front crawl—It starts with a glide, he says. The glide is everything—but the boy loses interest. Marin sits with the baby on a blanket under an umbrella. The baby wears a hat.
The dog runs wild wild wild. Runs like it’s never run in its whole dog life. Jake throws a tennis ball and the dog brings it back. The dog wants so bad it doesn’t know what it wants, and each time it returns Jake must wrest the ball from the folds of its wet black lipflesh. Jake throws the ball out into the water. He wears a baseball cap with white sweat lines creeping up the band. Once, the dog jumps up and knocks the bill of the hat, and Jake lifts it slightly to reposition it. Marin is shocked to see he’s lost most of the hair on the top of his head. His thick, sandy blond hair, once hearty as dune grass. She cannot imagine when this would have happened.
Each time the dog emerges from the lake it shakes itself violently, spraying Marin and the baby with stinking dog water. Jake ought to do something about this but doesn’t. Marin tries to position the umbrella so as to protect the baby from both the dog and the sun, but the maneuver is impossible. She grows to hate the dog. The damn dog’s name is Mingus. In her head she calls it Dingus. In her head she says,
Go away, Dingus. Dingus, go lay down. Bad Dingus.
Down the beach, a young couple is lying wrapped together in a single towel, kissing. Dingus bounds up to them and begins to growl. Jake calls to the dog, ineffectually. Sorry, he calls down the beach.
Poor kids, says Marin.
They’re young, Jake says. Plenty of time for that.
Marin scoffs and Jake turns to her. He nods to the baby in its hat and says, Been a while?
Marin looks up at him, squinting. Too long, she says.
Carter and Jake had been on the diving team together in college. Of course, she ended up with Carter, years later. But it was Jake first. Marin can still remember the first time she saw him, in the backyard at a house party, standing barefoot in the moist grass, shifting his weight gently from one foot to the other. There was a crowd gathered around him. He rubbed his hands together and pursed his fine lips. His eyes met Marin’s for a moment; then he flung himself backward, landing sturdy and fantastic on his bare feet. His audience applauded, begging drunkenly for more as Jake slipped back into his shoes.
By sunset the gang returns to camp. Jake and Carter walk to the store to get beer and marshmallows. Despite their considerable protests, the children are forced to stay behind. Val and Marin start dinner. The baby sleeps faceup on a blanket in the shade. The children throw rocks and bark chips at Dingus. They scream at each other constantly. Val does not seem to hear them. A snaky twilight settles over the lake basin. There is a smell of wood smoke and the fires of adjacent campsites visible between the branchless trunks of pine.
The men return. Hatless now and rosy headed, Jake sets a twelve-pack of IPA on the picnic table, where Marin is shucking corn. Carter goes to the baby and lifts him from the blanket. Nearby, reddening charcoal biscuits throb in the campsite grill. Val sorts through the groceries the men brought. She turns to Jake, wagging a wet package of hot dogs at him. Why did you buy these?
You like them, Jake says. Remember? We had them in Mammoth. You were surprised how much flavor could fit into such a skinny frank.
But I have chicken, says Val, gesturing to a plastic bowl where breasts, legs, thighs and wings have been marinating in blood-colored barbecue sauce.
The boy says, Get over it, Mom. Chicken is old cabbage.
Yeah, says the girl. Old cabbage.
The boy says, She’s copying me.
Val is a sport. She looks at Marin and shrugs. Old cabbage, she says. I don’t know where he got that.
Marin has a beer with her frank. She catches Carter glancing at the beer from across the table. She has not had a drink in nearly a year. But she can tonight. Marin stopped breast-feeding a week ago. She was an underproducer. When the child was born she could pump just an ounce from the right breast, two from the left. Carter kept a chart. The pediatrician told her to drink more water. She did, constantly, but it was never enough. The baby had to get fifty-one percent of his milk from the breast, Carter said. Fifty-one
at least
. Marin tried Mother’s Milk herbal tea. She tried blessed thistle. One fenugreek capsule a day. Two. Three. A prescription for Reglan. Still, she was expressing only three ounces on the right and two on the left. His word,
expressing
. Finally, they went to formula entirely. Another disappointment her husband has endured silently.
Or silently until today. In the rental car on the drive up from Reno he asked whether she was experiencing any pain from stopping. Any pressure.
No, she said.
No, said Carter, thoughtfully. I guess you wouldn’t.
After dinner the troop roasts marshmallows. The boy inevitably pokes his sister with his roasting stick. She cries and pouts and is not satisfied until Val puts him in time-out in the cabin of the RV. In the commotion of discipline and fairness, Marin retrieves another beer from the cooler.