Night at the Fiestas: Stories Read online

  The day before the wedding, Nemecia invited me to the beach with her girlfriend. I said I couldn’t go—I was fifteen, younger than they were, and I didn’t have a swimming suit.

  “Of course you’ll come. You’re my little sister.” Nemecia opened a messy drawer and tossed me a tangled blue suit. I remember I changed in her bedroom, turned in the full-length mirror, stretched across her pink satin bed and posed like a pinup. I felt older, sensual. There, in Nemecia’s bedroom, I liked the image of myself in that swimming suit, but on the beach my courage left me. Someone took our picture, standing with a tanned, smiling man. I still have the picture. Nemecia and her friend look easy in their suits, arms draped around the man’s neck. The man—who is he? How did he come to be in the photograph?—has his arm around Nemecia’s small waist. I am beside her, hand on her shoulder, but standing as though I’m afraid to touch her. She leans into the man and away from me, her smile broad and white. I smile with my lips closed, and my other arm is folded in front of my chest. My scar shows as a gray smear on my cheek.

  WHEN SHE LEFT FOR LOS ANGELES, Nemecia didn’t take the doll that sat on the bureau. The doll came with us when we moved to Albuquerque; we saved it, I suppose, for Nemecia’s children, though we never said so out loud. Later, after my mother died in 1981, I brought it from her house, where for years my mother had kept it on her own bureau. For five days it lay on the table in my apartment before I called Nemecia and asked if she wanted it back.

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she said. “I never had a doll.”

  “The cracked one, remember?” My voice went high with disbelief. It seemed impossible that she could have forgotten. It had sat in our room for years, facing us in our beds each night as we fell asleep. A flare of anger ignited—she was lying, she had to be lying—then died.

  I touched the yellowed hem of the doll’s dress, while Nemecia told me about the cruise she and her husband were taking through the Panama Canal. “Ten days,” she said, “and then we’re going to stay for three days in Puerto Rico. It’s a new boat, with casinos and pools and ballrooms. I hear they treat you royally.” While she talked, I ran my finger along the ridge of the cracks in the doll’s head. From the sound of her voice, I could almost imagine she’d never aged, and it seemed to me I’d spent my whole life listening to Nemecia’s stories.

  “So what about the doll?” I asked when it was almost time to hang up. “Do you want me to send it?”

  “I can’t even picture it,” she said and laughed. “Do whatever you want. I don’t need old things lying around the house.”

  I was tempted to take offense, to think it was me she was rejecting, our whole shared past in Cuipas. I was tempted to slip back into that same old envy for how easily Nemecia had let those years drop away from her, leaving me to remember her stories. But by then I was old enough to know that she wasn’t thinking about me at all.

  Nemecia spent the rest of her life in Los Angeles. I visited her once when I had some vacation time saved, in her long, low house surrounded by bougainvillea. She collected Dolls of the World and Waterford Crystal, which she displayed in glass cases. She sat me at the dining room table and took the dolls out one by one. “Holland,” she said and set it before me. “Italy. Greece.” I tried to see some evidence in her face of what she had witnessed as a child, but there was nothing.

  Nemecia held a wineglass up to the window and turned it. “See how clear?” Shards of light moved across her face.

  MOJAVE RATS

  LAST NIGHT MONICA VIGIL-RIOS HAD LAIN AWAKE, LISTENING to the wind whip across the salt flats and buffet the trailer, imagining intruders with dark intentions outside. They were living in a piece of aluminum foil, Monica thought. That paltry lock wouldn’t withstand a can opener.

  And so, as if in retaliation for her ingratitude, the trailer’s heater stopped working. Monica awoke at dawn to seven-year-old Cordelia whimpering from the loft above the dinette. “Mama,” Cordelia said, still half-asleep. “It’s cold.”

  “Goddamn it,” said Monica. It was like a scene out of Dickens, she thought: her very own Little Dorrit, failed once again by her feckless parent. An unpleasant rush of guilt came over her, followed by a prickling irritation at Cordelia for causing this guilt, followed, predictably, by a fresh surge of remorse.

  It was cold, a dry hopeless cold that made Monica gasp when she slid out of her sleeping bag on the foldout sofa.

  “Come on, sweet pea.” She helped the shivering Cordelia down from the loft and tucked her into her own warm bed beside the baby, who was still blissfully asleep, cheeks chilled and pink, the skin at her nose and mouth raw and crusted. “You snuggle close to Beatrice. She’ll be your own personal heater.” Monica slipped on her jacket, wincing at the icy lining, and pushed out into the wind to see what could be done about the furnace.

  If only the heat had held on just one more day. Elliot was due back tonight. He’d been away for a week with the car and his rock pick, collecting soil samples, his thoughts locked on some million-year-old landscape only he could see. God, she hoped he’d found what he was looking for.

  “I’ll be afraid here all alone,” she’d told him before he left, meaning, “I’ll miss you.”

  “Of course you won’t,” he’d said kindly, and they’d all waved as he pulled away, Cordelia shouting to her stepfather, “Goodbye, Elliot! Goodbye!” until the dust settled. As the week progressed, Monica had found herself increasingly lonely, and though she’d read endless stories and done cooking projects and kept chipper for the girls, she’d never felt so stuck or at such loose ends.

  Now Monica was furious with Elliot for leaving her stranded, furious with him for not finishing his fieldwork months ago, when he was supposed to. “I was out there for hours,” she imagined telling him, though she never would. “I had to leave the girls unattended.”

  When she finally located the furnace on the rear of the trailer, the panel, of course, had to be screwed off, so Monica went back inside to rummage through Elliot’s tools in the greasy storage space under the bench seat. After rejecting several Phillips-head screwdrivers, she finally found a too-small flathead she would have to make work.

  Monica went through these motions knowing all the while that once she finally managed to remove the panel, she would have no idea how to begin to repair the furnace. Still, she felt compelled to stay outside as the wind slashed at her face and hair, the screwdriver almost too frigid to hold, stabbing away at the edge of the aluminum panel (which had, it seemed, rusted itself stubbornly in place), as if locating the problem were somehow the same as fixing it.

  The sun peered weakly over the Spring Mountains and the salt flats glowed a faint orange. From where she stood, huddled against the trailer, Monica could hear the sign out on the highway, which had come loose from one of its posts and flapped in the wind, a violent, incessant popping. Years from now, Monica thought bitterly, when she looked back on this time in her life, the sign with its faded palm tree is what she’d remember. WELCOME TO FABULOUS GYPSUM!

  Fabulous Gypsum! was all exposure and dust, wind and bleak, pale sky, and, at least until Elliot finished the fieldwork that would form the basis of his dissertation on the Death Valley fault system, it was home. The Shady Lanes RV Park was three miles from the town, which was comprised of a school, a post office operating out of a sun-bleached single-wide, and a grocery store with its wall of clanging slot machines. The Lucky Token, the store was called, as if gambling were the necessity and food an afterthought. Faint mountains ringed the horizon, and the cracked flats stretched into the distance, punctuated only by creosote and desert needle.

  Finally, Monica gave up on the furnace. Inside, she rejoined the girls in bed, trying to get warm, then fell into a deep sleep until Cordelia stirred beside her. “Shit,” said Monica, glancing at her watch. “Shit, shit, shit.” They were late; already the schoolbus, half-filled with shaggy-headed blond children from the outlying ranches, had passed them by.

  “We c
an run,” Cordelia said encouragingly.

  “Honey, the bus is miles away now.”

  Cordelia slumped and flung her head back in despair. “But it’s art day!”

  Monica sighed. Cordelia would not be spared the cold, and Monica would not be spared Cordelia.

  Monica zipped Cordelia into her jacket, tucked Elliot’s old down parka around Beatrice, and turned the stroller on its stiff wheels. “We’re going on an adventure!” called Monica, and the three of them leaned into the blowing grit and made their bumpy way across the dirt expanse toward the bathrooms and the pay phone.

  The park could accommodate forty trailers, each with electric and water hookups, but since they’d arrived eight months ago, there had never been more than ten vehicles scattered at any given time. Today there were six. Across the way, the NASA engineer bent, as usual, over the open hood of his truck. He looked up as she passed, and Monica gave a tight smile, acutely aware that she was a woman encumbered with children, carless and alone in the middle of nowhere.

  Cordelia, trotting along with her hand on the stroller, waved. The NASA engineer grunted and ducked his head, though when Monica glanced back, he was watching her.

  His truck hadn’t run for years, the park manager had told Elliot. When he wasn’t tinkering with the dead engine, the NASA engineer lived beneath the camper shell, the plastic windows murky with things piled against them. Once, when the tailgate was down, Monica had glimpsed the crammed nest of blankets and electronics and engine parts among which, apparently, the man burrowed like a rodent.

  According to the park manager, the man had once been brilliant, working on high-tech heat-resistant compounds. This didn’t surprise Monica. He could have been anything: child molester, gambling addict, harmless kook. Why not a NASA engineer? She wondered if Gypsum had been his destination, or if this was simply where his truck had sputtered to a stop.

  If only they had the car, she’d drive into town, spend the day in the heated grocery store wandering up and down the three short aisles. After school, she’d buy Cordelia a treat, let her stand at a safe distance and watch the old men at the slot machines. Maybe they’d skip Gypsum altogether and drive all the way to Las Vegas.

  “It’s not fair that Elliot gets the car and not us.” Cordelia kicked the dirt.

  “You’re right,” said Monica. “It’s not fair.”

  “You maybe don’t know this about me, but I’m a kid who loves school.”

  Monica catalogued her neighbors, but there was no one she could envision asking for a ride to town. The torpid, obese family in the RV across the way; the desiccated couple with their nylon shorts and extreme low-calorie diet, running endlessly along the highway; the ubiquitous single men as filthy and bearded as miners. When she encountered them, returning a word or a wave in the icy cinder-block bathroom or passing on her walks with Beatrice, Monica couldn’t help imagining sordid stories for them: mental illness, violent crime, shattering personal tragedy. The place caught people like trash in a wire fence, damaged, discarded people blown out of the bright tree-lined towns of America, held here until the wind came up.

  Mojave rats, Elliot called them, these denizens of the dust. The Manson Family had camped out here, he informed Monica, had squatted in various ghost towns, lurking in falling wood-framed buildings, carving their names in porch posts and crumbling plaster, before moving on to prepare for Helter Skelter. To Elliot these facts were secondary to the facts about the area’s geology, interesting in their way, but having nothing to do with him.

  So Monica held herself aloof, determined that people understand she wasn’t like them. On her walks, she recited poetry to Beatrice. She carried her paperback of Middlemarch with its cover facing out, displaying the nineteenth-century painting. Monica wasn’t proud of her pretentions. But it was so easy to feel disdain for these people, so vital that she not be mistaken for one of them. “My husband is doing research here,” she told the few people she spoke to, and just saying the words comforted her. Research. Husband. These words were her talismans, all that prevented her from sliding into their grim lives. She told herself again and again that her time at Shady Lanes was only prelude to her real life: she would live in a little house filled with books, attend dinner parties with well-traveled intellectuals. She would finish college, the first in her family, maybe even get her master’s. She would be a professor’s wife. Occasionally, Monica even allowed herself to imagine teaching a literature class in a seminar room overlooking a grassy quad. “Come over, have a coffee,” a retired woman from Calgary had invited in the fall, but Monica had declined and afterward had been forced to avoid her. It had been a relief when the woman and her husband fired up their RV and drove east to Arizona.

  At the edge of the highway, Monica parked the stroller outside the pay phone, the plexiglass walls of which had been sandblasted into opacity. The phone book covered all of Nye County, but every listing under Heaters, Furnaces, and RVs was located in either Beatty or Tonopah. As Monica leafed through the dusty pages, they flapped and tore. The phone number for the Gypsum hardware store was apparently no longer in service. Just as well, thought Monica dismally; fixing the furnace would cost money they didn’t have.

  When Monica looked up, an oncoming semi was growing steadily larger, and Cordelia had drifted away and was inspecting rocks dangerously close to the shoulder of the road.

  “Get back!” yelled Monica.

  Cordelia looked up, her hands crammed with rocks. “I am back,” she protested.

  Just then the eighteen-wheeler passed in a shuddering rush, stirring loose curls of dust along the road. Monica dropped the phone, sending it clanging against the booth, and yanked Cordelia by the arm.

  “Don’t you ever—” she started, not caring how much she hurt Cordelia—glad to hurt her, even—but Beatrice, strapped into her stroller as the dust storm blew over her, clutched at her eyes and began to wail.

  “Mama!” called Cordelia urgently over the baby’s squalls. “Beatrice has dirt in her eyes.”

  “I know,” snapped Monica, and now Cordelia’s face crumpled, her feelings, as always, wounded.

  It was pointless to look at Beatrice’s eyes here; each time Monica managed to pull the little fist away and pry one open, a new gust assaulted them. Beatrice arched her back and screamed in outraged pain. “We’re going home,” said Monica, defeated.

  “I’m going to be in deep trouble for missing school,” said Cordelia. She stomped along behind, her thick black hair tangled, lips shading violet.

  “You won’t be in trouble. It’s my fault.”

  “I know,” said Cordelia.

  As Monica collapsed the stroller, she glanced at the RV across the way, where the overweight family lived, and for a brief alarming moment thought she saw a pale face in the dim window, watching her. She blinked and looked again: nothing.

  Cordelia hauled herself up the metal steps. “So?” she accused. “What about the heater?”

  There was nothing frightening about a face in a window, Monica thought, jiggling Beatrice in her arms. Didn’t Monica look out her own windows? Still, Monica missed Elliot, with his electrical know-how, his logic and warm, male bulk.

  “Well?” asked Cordelia.

  “Today we’re going to be pioneers.” Monica held open the door for her, and the grit gusted through, chattering on the linoleum.

  IMAGINING THEIR LIFE in a trailer from the comfort of their rental in Santa Fe (a ten-minute walk from her mother’s house and where she’d grown up), Monica had thought of Mr. Toad with his gypsy caravan. Before Elliot and Monica had married last year, Elliot’s mother had bought Cordelia a beautiful illustrated copy of The Wind in the Willows. Monica had never read it as a child, and she, with Cordelia, loved the picture of Toad’s caravan, the bright paint (“canary yellow picked out in green”), snug curtained bed, patterned dishes lined up on shelves. The promise of both comfort and adventure.

  Their eighteen-foot aluminum Travel Lite, however, delivered neither. Brown st
ripes outside, dingy brick-patterned linoleum inside, hideous orange plaid curtains that snapped shut. The trailer smelled of particleboard and dust.

  Monica turned the oven on high and bundled herself and the girls into the sleeping loft. This might have been a nice way to spend the morning, cozy and giggling in the nest of sleeping bags with their books. When she wanted to be, Cordelia was excellent company, a watchful performer, making droll observations for her mother’s benefit. Instead, they were all sluggish and irritable. Beatrice whimpered with discomfort while Monica and Cordelia took turns wiping her chapped nose.

  “Toad has a heater,” Cordelia observed pointedly. She clawed through the book and indicated the cozy potbellied woodstove on their favorite page.

  “Yes,” Monica agreed and sighed, exhausted by the relentless optimism motherhood demanded. “But Toad didn’t have lots of things we have. Radio. Indoor plumbing.”

  “Not here. Not here we don’t have indoor plumbing.” Her tone was injured. “Look at Beatrice,” she demanded, pointing to the baby’s unsightly muzzle. “You should take her to a doctor. She isn’t even cute anymore.”

  Monica dabbed at the baby’s nose, which certainly did look worse than it was. “It’s dry skin. We live in a very dry place. The doctor will just tell us to put Vaseline on her, Cordelia. Which I’m doing.”

  Monica was no fool: she could read the signs of a child in survival mode. Even as a baby, Cordelia had known to fall silent when her parents fought; to this day, if Elliot was curt, she stiffened, wary. Cordelia’s watchfulness made Monica uneasy. Now, with the arrival of Beatrice, her personality had developed into something sterner still. She guarded her sister vigilantly, turned a fierce eye on her mother and stepfather, evaluating their every move. “Too rough,” she’d scold Elliot when he swung the gleeful baby. “Her arms could fall off.”

  Beatrice showed no such complexity. The baby laughed often and loudly, and when she was tired or hungry, she wailed with the entire force of her strong little being. The world revolved around Beatrice, and Beatrice was appropriately ungrateful.