All My Relations (15 page)

“That was November,” Deirdre said. “It's almost Christmas.” She didn't want to talk about the mail. After three letters a week from Chacho, now no letters in five weeks.

From the top of the rise in the dirt road they saw the party, two bonfires in a dry swimming pool, part of an abandoned, reputed Mafia resort of the ‘50's. A couple of dozen natty teenagers danced to a boom box between the fires.

Deirdre soon was drunk again, with the accompanying tension that left her face lopsided and pugnacious. She was concentrating on Chacho's theory of sex: with abstinence, the sexual fluids would rise up the spine into the head, creating a dynamo of spiritual energy. “The face glows,” he'd said, “like yours.” While the tape was being changed, she climbed onto the diving board. Shadows of flames played over the pool like a negative
of sunlight on water. The board felt very high, and slender like a bending reed.

“What do any of you know about friendship?” she said. “The Filipinos understand friendship. Your
kasama
is your friend for life!
Pingsarili
—you would translate that as ‘privacy.' That's what I used to think. But Pilipino has no word for privacy.
Pingsarili
is like loneliness. Imagine a people whose word for privacy means loneliness. Friendship!”

“Oh, Christ, Deirdre,” someone said. A bottle broke against a far wall.

From her back pocket, Deirdre pulled the scroll of Gibran's “On Friendship.” After reading, she replaced the parchment in her pocket and recited the whole from memory.

The others began singing loudly.

“Friendship is staying up all night on the beach, just talking,” Deirdre shouted. “Friendship is giving everything, your secrets, your voice, your language, and getting everything in return. Friendship is touching for love, not tutti-frutti. ‘Let there be no purpose in friendship save the deepening of the spirit.'”

The diving board sagged and bounced. Below Deirdre, her companions' faces looked as remote and featureless as pebbles. “Come sit with me,” Curtis was saying, and, his arm around her shoulders, he led her to the pool steps.

How many acres did the family farm? he asked. What was the growing season? What were the major crops of the Philippines? His pointed nose and sharp chin darted toward her with intense earnestness. Deirdre wasn't fooled. She knew he quizzed her to disguise his boredom with the Philippines. She didn't care. Boring everybody gave her a sense of accomplishment and pride. Curtis at least tried to be interested.

Deirdre explained the planting of rice. She remembered ambling home astride the carabao, led by Chacho, how she could lean forward and grip the animal's sweeping horns, like tremendous handlebars, and rub the forehead, broad as a slab
of moss-covered mahogany. Chacho's brown feet squashed into the mud, guiding her through green rice plants and rich brown earth, paddies that seemed endless.

“Do the women ever work in the fields topless?” Curtis asked.

“The old grannies, maybe, in the hills.”

“Did you ever work topless?” His forehead contracted into cobwebbed lines, his eyes squinted eagerly.

“Mother of God,” she said.

“My dick hangs down the left leg of my pants, and I notice that everyone else's is on the right,” Curtis blurted. He rolled and lit a joint, but something was wrong and one side of the paper flared up like a jet of natural gas. “My guess is that it won't function properly. Go in crooked. Gloria knows her sex, she would have caught that right off. There's the problem.”

After they'd gone together six months, Gloria had told Curtis she'd slept with a quarterhorse trainer she picked up at the track. The man, a Canadian, moved on with the racing circuit, but Gloria said since she was in love with him there was no point in seeing anyone else.

“Unzip,” Deirdre said. “Show me.”

“What?”

“Come on.”

Curtis turned his back to the bonfire, hunched forward, lowered his fly, and cupped his hand around, without touching, his exposed penis.

“It's fine,” Deirdre said. “No problem.”

“But how would you know?”

“My father leaves his lying around carelessly sometimes. Yours is much more appealing, believe me.”

Curtis finished his smoke. “This makes me nervous,” he said. “I'm going to move around.” He hopped the pool steps two at a time and began loping along the rim of the pool, circling it twice with high, floating bounds. His white hair stood on end,
settled, rose, fell. The black circles made his eyes look enormous in his white face.

On Deirdre's front porch, Curtis suddenly kissed her on the lips. Startled, she allowed his tongue in her mouth. Her mouth gaped open, slack, until he put his hand on the seat of her jeans. She stiffened. Her saliva took on a metallic tinge. She thought of his hands in fur, a dead animal, his fingers breaking through desiccated skin and tufts of hair. A line of teenagers embraced, the girls in their pleated skirts crumbling, clothes collapsing to the concrete floor of the swimming pool. “Good night,” Deirdre said. Pushing off Curtis's chest, she backed through the door.

Her father sat in the dark facing the gray slush of the TV screen. The pale light traveled up his legs, to his open fly and his penis, which pointed straight at his head. True as a compass needle, Deirdre thought. She hurried by.

Sitting on her bed, chin in hand, she thought of how Chacho, when he talked most seriously to her, would lie on his elbow and pluck at whatever was beneath him—grass, reed matting, sand. He had long black lashes. His eyes were soft; if she touched them, they would feel like the bodies of bees. Beauty in her life, Deirdre reminded herself, was a sign of favor, and Chacho was beautiful.

Deirdre woke at four in the morning to go to the bathroom. The kitchen light was on. Her father's armchair was empty, so he was spending the night in the master bedroom. Her mother, naked except for a black lace bra, an old birthday gift from her father, stood by the kitchen sink. Deirdre retreated into the shadow of the living room. She hadn't seen her mother naked that she could remember. Her mother reached for the cutting board and laid it on the counter. She turned, passed from Deirdre's view. The refrigerator door opened, shut. Her mother brought bread, a head of lettuce, mayonnaise, and luncheon meat to the counter. She spread mayonnaise on the bread.
Her belly and buttocks were round and white, too soft, even baggy. Afraid, feeling unbearable tenderness, Deirdre ran into the kitchen. Her mother shrieked. On her knees, Deirdre embraced those soft parts of her mother, pressed her face against them, the fluff of pubic hair.

“How can you let him have this?” she said. “How can you give it to him?”

Her mother, frozen, holding the knife and a slice of ham, stared at her. Then her eyes, as large and clear as Deirdre's, but blue, shifted vaguely around the room. She stepped free and returned wearing a robe.

“
Go to bed
,” she said. Deirdre stood, wanting to resist, but the robe stymied her. She could think of nothing to say.

To help herself sleep, Deirdre remembered wrestling Chacho's sisters in the pond. The girls clambered over her back, and she toppled forward. Chacho's arm shot around her waist, breaking the fall, and the tower of people collapsed on Papa and Mama on the bank. For a moment, the children squirming over her, Papa grunting underneath, Deirdre hadn't wanted to move, to leave the warm, wet flesh against her skin. The tangle rolled over on itself. The girls yipped. “Yaaah,” said Chacho. “Ou ou ou,” Papa said, punching and prodding the mass of flesh as if molding a great ball of dough. Smelling again their moist, common scent, Deirdre drowsed.

Friday there were no letters. Deirdre went to bed early and slept until Saturday noon.

It was time to check the mail. Her father waved. Cheerleaders were kicking long diagonals across the TV screen, the tips of their feet disappearing beyond the edge of the small picture tube.

Outside, a kite, rising on the unseasonably warm breeze, showed red against a fat bank of clouds. A packet from the Philippines lay in the mailbox. Deirdre slit the envelope with her fingernail and unfolded Chacho's note. He apologized for the
delay. Papa had forgotten to send in the film, and then processing had taken longer than anyone could have imagined. He apologized for not having written. He was engaged to be married. The girl was a Christian Chinese, daughter of a grocer with connections to a department store chain in Manila. Chacho had never spoken to her. Papa and Mama were very enthusiastic, and he must obey their wishes. It was difficult for him to tell her this. He would write more later. He closed
“Iniigib kita”
—I love you.

The kite dipped in the pale sky. The bright winter sun seemed to have leached color from everything—house, trees, the bicycle on the lawn. Deirdre refolded the note and with great care tried to put it in her shirt pocket. The shirt had no pockets. Deirdre let herself into the house. She saw her father's bladelike face, small ears tight against his crew cut, the shriveled, twisted feet, and hatred clenched her stomach. She locked the bathroom door behind her, feeling enclosed in hatred like a vault. Sitting on the edge of the tub, she scraped her father's razor across her wrists until blood dripped onto the white porcelain. Then she began to cry. Running the bathwater to hide the sound, she staunched the blood with a washcloth. The wounds were only shallow scratches.

She called Curtis. He was covering a basketball invitational in Phoenix, because the sports editor was sick, he said, and of course she could come.

Wearing a long-sleeved blouse with frilled cuffs over the Band-Aids, Deirdre sat against the door in Curtis's front seat. Curtis smoked a joint, seeds sizzling and popping as they chugged along the freeway in his ‘51 Plymouth. The night before, he'd taken speed and lain awake reconstructing every minute he'd spent with Gloria. For an hour and a half he delivered the history to Deirdre, jerking the steering wheel back and forth in time to the music, cursing cars that passed them—“Dog's ass. Carnal intimate of rats.”

Deirdre refused the puffs he offered. Watching his face, the most expressive, she realized, that she'd ever seen, she made a fascinating discovery. There was a wonderful beauty in the harshness of that face. Deirdre felt odd. Each moment was fragile, elongated. She couldn't remember where she lived, the number of her house, or what it looked like. The desert outside her window was unfamiliar. She couldn't judge if it were pretty or drab.

A swerve of the car threw his cigarettes on the floor. When she bent to retrieve them, he asked what was in her pocket.

“My photos.” Deirdre broke the seal on the envelope and removed the prints. They were stiff colored artifacts in her hand. Chacho cutting green peppers into likenesses of the family, Papa with his cigar and big ears, Mama's bun and wide skirt, Chacho's floppy pandanus hat, Deirdre's backpack like a hump. Deirdre and Chacho reciting his Pilipino translation of “On Friendship,” their mouths open exactly the same width on the same word. The sisters catching a frog. Chacho and Deirdre, late for Mass, running down a pink dirt path overhung with gray-green foliage, feet barely blurred. Each held the other's hat in place, his hand on her white lace chapel cap, her hand on his pandanus.

Deirdre tossed the photos on the seat. “You can look at them later,” she said.

Curtis glanced at her, said nothing, and lit a joint.

Early for the game, they drove down a broad, shady boulevard. Above the treetops, a violent pink and orange sunset flamed the glass of a double-decker mall, the Phoenix smog curling like smoke.

Curtis needed more cigarettes. A series of turns took them into a black ghetto. Children popped wheelies on their bikes. People talked in doorways. The buildings were dingy and decayed. A tattered billboard showed an airplane flying into a glass of beer. Lying against the brick wall of a lounge, a man threw a tennis ball in the air, catching it without changing the position of his hands.

“Brrr, this is sad,” Curtis said. “I shouldn't feel good in a place like this, but I do. Isn't that terrible? But Gloria and I were so close when we were sad. When she was depressed, she'd call, and we'd want so much to be together, but it would be too late at night and we couldn't. It was a sweet thing. I love her so much,” he said, banging his hands on the steering wheel. “That's why I wanted to touch her. It would have been enough to feel the skin of her back. I always wondered if she has a nice back. That's important to me.”

“I'm sure she does,” Deirdre said. “Gloria has lovely bones.”

“What's wrong with me? Six months, and then the first time she meets this Canadian horse mugger—I hate Canada. I read the hockey box scores every day to see the Canadiens lose. I want them to lose every one of their games.”

“It makes me angry that Gloria treated you so badly. She needs a good kick.” Deirdre's voice rose. She was trembling.

Curtis looked at her again. “Do you want a drink? We could have someone buy us a bottle.”

Deirdre shook her head.

The gym was like an old hangar of yellow wood. Deirdre studied the rows of bleachers. Their existence seemed arbitrary. She might look away and back, she thought, and half would be gone. It was all a matter of pure chance. The buttocks of the players looked like sea sponges. Deirdre was unaware of the action until midway through the fourth quarter when, their team ahead by twenty points, Curtis lit a cigarette.

“Idiot,” she said. “Do you want to get thrown out?” She crushed it on his bootsole.

Only when they were on the freeway home did Deirdre remember, “Chacho is getting married.”

“No,” Curtis said. “I don't believe it. Oh, honey.” He squeezed her arm tightly.

“We said we were never going to get married. Everly-Neverly Brothers never.” Though she'd drunk nothing, her tense jaw pulled her face lopsided. Bare sticks of growth flashed by in the
headlights. The vastness and emptiness of the desert sky, with its dull distant stars, terrified her. “He doesn't know her. He doesn't like her.”