All about Skin (13 page)

She holds it up. Sabina sees the sprawling tea-colored stain on the chest and reaching under one armpit.

Hot coffee, says Lucy. My mother always spilled food and drink on her clothes!

Sabina feels dizzy with exhaustion, as if she has not slept for days. It is true, for many nights, she has stayed awake, trying to take in what has happened. In her right hand, buried in her pocket, she rubs the cold metal tag with the name engraved on it. She has carried it here, feeling in some intricate way a need to return it to Lucy. She is not certain how this will transpire, what response might ensue. To have a pet for years, to have loved a creature so long, to not know whether she is still alive or has died—Sabina cannot bear to contemplate that kind of emptiness.

Tossing and turning on her bed that first night she kept seeing an image of that monkey in white rushing at Lucy, and Lucy, the eternal child, without a child of her own, caring selflessly for her mother, then her macaque. Her sleep when it came was split open by dreams that were explicit and troubling. The blackness of corridors, cringing animals in cages, the sound of her own soft-shoed footsteps, cold shine of steel in hands, and in the room her father. A shadowy, central figure in a white lab coat with a glittering mirror globe in his hands, multiple bar-like protrusions on it. In North America, Nepal, India. Where the monkeys are bred or taken from, she realizes, waking. But in the dream it felt like her father was everywhere in the world, the globe ominously turning. She could not escape him.

She woke with a singular want, the burning need to give Lucy something, to comfort her in some way, ease the desolation. It is what has brought her to this moment, clutching the tag like a talisman.

In a dusty part of her mind she senses the tag, so freighted with memory, might not be what Lucy would want after all, that seal of certainty it would put on her pet's departure—but she ignores it. The part that is still child in her is eager, hopeful. Surely it is something? A closure, an acknowledgment. Surely Lucy would want to keep it beside her forever?

The child part of her insists the tag belongs to Lucy, it has to be returned.

True, there is a problem—how to bring it up, tell the story? And how much to tell really?

Sabina lets the fingers of her right hand tease over the indented lettering of the name inside the shadow of her pocket. The molten sorrow she feels, touching the tag, erupts inside her. Each time she touches it, she finds herself inside that corridor, staring into the eyes of a caged beagle.

In her left hand she holds a pen and the chart. She should be thinking up a story, a way to approach the subject. But without wanting to, she returns inescapably to thoughts of her father. Underneath, in her longing, as she is used for years to doing, she is trying, mentally, to disassociate what she has learned from him. He is not the only one to blame, she thinks. Surely he is one in a long line of those behind him who used the animal model for research, who swore by it, who didn't care where their animals came from. She should have an awareness of that, she cautions herself.

But crowding her vision, swarming her breath, is an implacable desire to escape, to leave home, set up house on her own. For years she has resisted doing this. She has felt close and bound to her family for as long as she can remember. There was a moment, just before she got into college, when she could have struck out on her own, pursued her independence. But, just as the applications from out-of-state colleges fell away, unfilled, so did that moment. Perhaps it segued, seamlessly, into her growing awareness of her parents growing older, her need to take care of them. Always, underneath, her conscience, ticking.

Now, she thinks (blanketing that guilt), she could rent an apartment. She is an only child, close to her parents. She is a good Indian child, even if second generation; she
wants
to take care of them. The love one has for the mother and father who have raised you, from the beginning, can never be forgotten. But here she is, wanting to escape, to do something American. Live on her own for a while, even if it is only a short time. She could share with someone. She could dream up a plan for saving those baby macaques and other animals from their breeding places, their labs and dungeons.

Talking, Lucy has slipped into a memory of her mother. She would take me out to Carlyn Springs for ice cream, Lucy is saying. In the summer the ice-cream parlor was always full. But she would wait till we got a booth.

Sabina sees how the days and wind have dislodged petals on the burgeoning white blooms of the pear tree outside the window; they lie in a drift on the pearled, dusted-with-mist grass. It is a cloudy silver-gray day. Mist swirls under trees, in the distance. Through it, a cardinal calls, sharp and sweet. A wetness drips from the leaves of the linden. Red cherry ice cream with chocolate bits in it, Lucy is saying, we ordered that a lot. It was my favorite. She pauses. Or was it my mother's? She fingers the delicate gold chain at her neck, touches the oval cameo of her pendant. Look, she says, Look, Dr. Kannan—and she snaps it open to the beautiful sepia hues of a woman in profile, smiling, hair pulled high and back, a high ruffled collar, a row of shiny buttons on her blouse. My mother, says Lucy, and touches the picture. A watery drop follows. Lucy is crying.

Sabina looks quickly away, to the dissolving contours of the misty scene outside the window.

She slides the pads of her fingertips gently over the metal tag in her pocket. She thinks, now is the moment.

My mother is the one who suggested having a monkey as a pet, Lucy is saying. When you are sick, you need an extra pair of hands, she would say. So I got one! And it is true, when I was sick, Delilah took care of me.

She did?

I remember once I woke up at night coughing. Delilah gave me the bottle of cough syrup from my night stand. She found a spoon. I was so sick, I could not get out of bed. Delilah took care of me. She had her own bed, but she would sleep with me. And when I was sick, especially, it was a comfort.

Sabina listens as Lucy speaks, lifts her hand, bare, from her pocket. Slowly, she does her work, recording breathing, heart sounds, pulse. I will tell her about the people who loved her first, she resolves, the lab technicians, even her father, the researcher. Then about the bunchers, the way it was with the dearth of macaques in the '70s. Then show her the tag, give it to her. I could start by saying,
Wouldn't you like to know
…

When it comes to it, words fail her, even her voice weakens.

You know, she begins.

But Lucy is still speaking and does not hear her. When she was sick, I took care of her too. She was healthy, mostly. But she had a stomach problem sometimes. I gave her apples then; I would make applesauce for her, and steam vegetables.

Sabina stares at her. Her heart feels like it is thudding very loudly in her chest. She had so prepared herself to tell this soft, bearable version of the story she is still trying to compose that she feels tense and untrue from head to toe.

It is what I thought of often, afterward, Lucy is saying. Her eyes are misting over. I wondered who took care of her, if they fed her the way I did, if they held her in their arms and comforted her when she was sick.

Sabina takes a breath. She stares at Lucy and sees only sad golden eyes, looking up at her.

That is my hope for her, Lucy is saying, that whoever took her, they cared for her, that she was loved.

Lucy is gazing at the pear tree, and tears are running down her face. Sabina finds the box of tissues and hands it to her. She stays a little longer, making consoling sounds, trying to change the subject. Inside of her she feels frozen, as if the lump in her own throat has become an unscaleable obstacle. She steals away.

All through that day she carries it, like a secret, burning weight in her pocket. All through the day the mist lingers, streetlights beginning to glitter under the trees. When her shift is over, in the late evening she walks into the nursing home's garden toward the white pear tree that Lucy can see from her window; she lifts the already-burgeoning ground ivy with her hand, digs a small hole in the dirt with one end of the tag, buries it.

A small desolation sweeps through her. She looks up. Lucy has come to the window as if to see what she is doing. She waves.

She weaves her way back through flowerbeds, now in the slow descent of damp twigs and flowers grazing her cheek, eyes fixed on the new, thrusting leaves of feathery yarrow and salvia at her feet, keeping her tread firm, as if she can see, etched in front of her in the garden's private dusk, a path through all of it.

Ivelisse Rodriguez

O
ur war—our
love
war—bravely fought against our mothers for the past three years, the war that led my friends to unabashedly fall in love our first year in college and left me waiting for our summer break to start fighting again—that war—I know is going to come to a very resounding end a week or so after we come home from college, all because the boyfriends quickly start reneging on a thousand pledges made through the course of relationships started, at most, a mere eight months ago. Ruthie's man writes her from California saying he's dropping out of school and is moving to Alaska to work on a fishing boat and that maybe in another life they can continue where they left off. Alexa's man just stops calling her back. And Yahira. That's the worst one of all. He tells her that every utterance of love, memory created, caress given—stomp on grapes, suck the juice—all of it's a lie.

Yet the most important contract being broken because of the departure of these boyfriends is the one we girls made between each other when we started this war against our mothers: to believe in love. Just the summer before—fighting, yelling, believing—me, Yahira, Alexa, and Ruthie, and a host of other girls, would tell love stories. And our mothers would tell anti-love stories, and we did this every week in Springdale Park for three years until we went off to college.

This was our war.

And now, love is fighting all of us—it's kicking our asses.

“Maybe they were right,” my friends say about our mothers.

“I don't know what to say. I mean, I'm sorry this happened to all of you, but I don't want to give in to what our mothers want,” I say.

“Did you even date anyone?” Baby Ruthie counters.

“Yeah, Rosie, you spent this whole year doing what?” Angry Alexa asks.

“How can you know how we feel? We can't believe in this love shit anymore,” Yahira, my best friend, says.

Their worlds may be falling apart, but my
worldview
is falling apart. Listening to them, I start to think I
do
know what it's like to be heartbroken. They don't even want to go out there and fight. They're sluggish when we go to our side of the park. Their declarations are muddied, half-hearted, broken-hearted. My friends sometimes seem to linger on our mothers' side of the park before they cross over to ours, and I imagine that if there were a fence between the two groups, my friends would leisurely hang on it, heads resting on their hands, and actually listen to our wacky mothers.

Decimated hearts. Blood everywhere. I'm looking at a battlefield full of wounded soldiers.

My mother, along with a long line of conspirators, told us always: Never trust a man. A man only wants one thing and as soon as he gets it, he'll be gone. The repercussions for falling in love were always the same—a broken heart and a bad girl rep, at best. At worst, a life of welfare checks and a baby every other year. Our mothers wanted something new for us. But it was really something old. Something borrowed. They wanted marriage. The divine notion of marriage. Our mothers didn't believe in love between men and women anymore, though. They just wanted our future husbands to stay. Marry, they said, but don't believe.

The neighborhood women always gathered at my house to preach on about how dirty men were. They'd begin by discussing a literary figure and note how she too had been scorned by men. And see, don't women come from a long line of rejected people? Then they'd move on to the neighborhood women and how times hadn't changed. Mr. Rivera, who left his wife for that no good Ms. Medina, was seen coming out of—you guessed it—Mrs. Torres's house and Mr. Torres was out of town visiting “
familia
,” again. Men cannot be trusted. Amen. This was their weekly prayer.

It all started with my mother. The day my father left, all anybody could hear throughout the neighborhood was twenty-six years of marriage breaking. The dishes breaking. Her heart breaking. Everything they had ever been told about love, marriage—all broken. And the women started coming one after the other, bringing handkerchiefs, pastries, and their own stories of broken love. For that one night, their lives held no clear trajectory. No absolute truths. Only emotion, chaos, and open doors.

During the first year of their meetings, all my mother could do was talk about my father. Stories about him were bubbling from her mouth at every meeting. And it was like you could see inside of her—the tributaries of memories pumping into her heart and back out. But then one day in the Chicopee Public Library, she came across “Ethan Brand” by Hawthorne (she had taken to going to the library in order to find out why her husband had left her) and she realized that she didn't have to spend the rest of her years with her heart dangling from her blouse.

I imagine that she came home that night, lightly coated with snow, took off her winter coat, looked at herself in the mirror, and realized that nobody had
really
told her her husband could leave her. She looked around her bedroom and started to move the furniture around. Noticed the dust that had accrued over the years and thought it was easy to wipe away. And placing her bed in the center, she must have reached into a medicine man's suitcase, full of tubes, syringes, cotton, and marble. Laid down and allowed the blood to drain out of her, while the marble poured in. And much like my father the year before, she walked out of her bedroom, unencumbered by a heart.