by
Lucia Berlin
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It wasn’t just that she was young. She had moved around all her life. Her father was a mining engineer; her mother had been ill, or crazy. She didn’t speak about them, except to say they had disowned her when she got married, wouldn’t answer her letters. You got the feeling no one had ever told her or shown her about growing up, about being part of a family or being a wife. That one reason she was so quiet was that she was watching, to see how it was all done.
The plane was so loaded down it barely got off the ground. When it finally did it took a god-awful time to get any altitude. Just missed the wires and then the cottonwoods at the river. The wings dipped a few times, and he wasn’t showing off. At last he was headed for Juarez and the tiny red taillight disappeared. I breathed and said thank God and drank.
I lay back down, shaking. I couldn’t bear it if Tyler were to crash. Just then the radio played “Silent Night,” which always gets me. I cried, just plain bawled my eyes out. It’s not true, what I said about him and Kate. I mind it a lot.
That was the extent of Maya’s objections. Gratitude was still a big part of her feeling toward Paul. Her first husband had left her when Sammy was nine months old and she was pregnant with Max. It had seemed like a miracle when Paul came along and loved Sammy and Max as well as her. She was determined to have a good marriage, to be a good wife. Still only nineteen, she had no idea what being a good wife meant. She did things like hold the hot part of the cup when she passed him coffee, offering him the handle.
noooo girl
In August the thunderstorms came. It was wonderful, the sound of the rain on the tin roof, the lightning and thunder. There were tomatoes and squash and corn. Maya and the boys swam and fished in the clear ditch every day.
But the mice never did go away. The plumbing never got put in. Buzz came back often when Paul wasn’t home.
In the autumn Paul got a job in New York. He and Maya packed everything into the van and a U-Haul trailer. Pete and Frances and Romulo moved into the big house that same day. They stood waving and waving as the car and the U-Haul drove away. Maya waved too and she wept. The plants, the red-winged blackbirds, her friends. She knew she’d never be back. She knew this wasn’t a good marriage either. Frances died a few years later, but Pete and Romulo still live in the house. They are both old now. They sit under the trees and play dominoes and drink beer. You can see the place from Corrales Road. A fine old adobe, well over a hundred years old. It’s the house with the blazing red trumpet vine, the house with roses, everywhere.
David rang the buzzer at 5:45. Hello! Hello! Hello!
“How was your day?”
“The same. And yours?”
Matt and Cassandra interrupted each other, telling him about their day, their picnic.
“It was beautiful. We slept under the cherry blossoms.”
“Great.” David smiled.
She smiled too. “On the way home I murdered the postman.”
“Mailman,” David said, taking off his tie.
“David. Please talk to me.”
Luis had grown out of beach-boying. He had a tiny dress shop that was the current rage. He sold colonial paintings and pre-Columbian art. No one knew where he got them or who made them. He taught yoga to American women, the same ones who bought all his dresses in every color. It was hard to tell if Luis loved women or hated them. He made them feel good. He got money from all of them one way or another.
The sun set with a hiss as the wave hit the beach. The woman continued up the checkered black and gold tiles of the malecón to the cliffs on the hill. Other people resumed walking too, once the sun had set, like spectators leaving a play. It isn’t just the beauty of the tropical sunset, she thought, the importance of it. In Oakland the sun set into the Pacific each evening and it was the end of another day. When you travel you step back from your own days, from the fragmented imperfect linearity of your time. As when reading a novel, the events and people become allegorical and eternal. The boy whistles on a wall in Mexico. Tess leans her head against a cow. They will keep doing that forever; the sun will just keep on falling into the sea.