Barbara Samuel (44 page)

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Trudy
The first time I see Lucille again, I am lying in my bed. Alone. My newly broken arm is propped on a pillow. It’s very late, close to dawn. My face is hot from crying and loss and Vicodin, which they gave me at the emergency room. The drugs are not appreciably helping stop the pain in my right arm, which is imprisoned in a cast to my elbow. It’s red. The cast, that is. Probably the arm, too, which feels like coyotes are chewing on it. And the world seems red, too, all around the edges.

When I open my eyes, Lucille is sitting in the chair where Rick always throws his clothes. She looks exactly the same, which should tip me off that something is slightly wrong, but in my current state, nothing seems real, so I just blink at her for a long minute.

It’s been twenty-five years since I’ve seen her. She’s wearing a shawl that a matador gave her, red with black silk fringes she plays with. There are heavy silver bracelets on her tanned arms, and she’s drinking a cocktail. It’s funny enough that I smile. Lucille always did believe in cocktails. My mother said she was a drunk, but she
wasn’t. I knew even then that my mother was just afraid of Lucille. Afraid of her sexuality, afraid of her courage, afraid of her version of womanhood. Afraid it would leak out of her house somehow, like bad water, to poison the whole neighborhood. My mother and her friends, all the ladies on the block, said terrible things about Lucille’s clothes—gossamer blouses that showed her low-cut bras, the sleek way she wore her hair and let all of her back show, nape to waist, on summer days. She told me it was a woman’s secret power, her back. It didn’t age the way other parts might.

Men found reasons to stop by her yard when she was working with her flowers, the flowers she nudged like magic daughters from the hard ground in the desert. Poppies as big as sombreros, waving long, black, inviting stamens from their silky hearts, and roses in impossible colors, and cosmos by the thousands.

The men stopped to admire her back. And her strong brown arms, and the glimpse of her lacy bras.

But mostly they stopped to hear that wild, bold poppy laugh come out of her throat. Stopped to have her admire them. Stopped to be watered by her joy

She was sixty-six years old when she moved into our neighborhood.

Now it has been twenty-five years and she’s at the foot of my bed, not in some ghostly form, but as solid as the cat purring on my hip. When she doesn’t say anything, I swallow the rawness in
my throat and croak, “What are you doing here?”

“Time to take it back, kiddo.”

“What?”

“Your life.”

2

Trudy
When Edgar dies, I am next door in my house, reading Lorca with my hands over my ears so I don’t have to hear the wind. It’s only because I have to take them down to turn the page that I hear Roberta’s cry, that piercing wail that can only be called keening.

It’s been a long day, waiting for this. Because I wanted to be here when the moment arrived, I didn’t go to the movies or out to the mall to distract myself from my own troubles. Roberta’s granddaughter, Jade, is on her way to Pueblo from California, but she isn’t here yet, and Roberta sent everybody else away. When the moment comes, she’ll need someone. So I’ve waited. Trying to keep warm—I’m wearing a T-shirt, a cotton
sweater and a wool one, two pairs of socks, and jeans—and I’m still cold. It’s like Rick was my furnace, and without him, I’m turning into an icicle.

And the wind is driving me crazy.

People often tell me how much they love the wind. I’ve sat, with my mouth open, while friends from elsewhere—they are always from somewhere else—rhapsodize about the winds they know, and I can tell that they’re thinking of an entirely different entity—a green goddess, trailing her veils over the beach or through the forest. They love a wind that comes with moisture and beauty.

In Pueblo, our winds are of the Inquisition variety, winds that know that the secret of torture is to begin and end, to be inconstant and constant at once, to bellow and to whisper. Endlessly.

This year, it’s been even worse than usual. Every morning, it gathers, gusting and stopping. Blasting and quitting. All day, it bangs on the windows and blusters around the car and buffets the trees and tears at the shrubs. Boxes blown from who knows where skitter down the street. There is no surface without grit. Static electricity can knock you down. I play music, loudly, to drown it out, put a pillow over my head at night.

But not today. I have to listen for Roberta.

For lunch, I pour some condensed chicken and stars soup into a pot and put the kettle on for tea, huddling next to the burners with my hands tucked under my armpits. The tea is indifferent, the soup the last can on the shelf. I was lucky to find that much worth consuming, really, since I keep forgetting to go to the grocery store. Right now, when I’m hungry for something better than
the cupboards have to offer, I look around for my list so I can write
good tea bags
on there, but it’s gone missing. Again. I can’t keep track of anything lately.

I used to spend at least two hours a week planning menus and shopping for my crew of five. Now it’s only me and my seventeen-year-old, Annie, but more often than not she eats at school or at her restaurant job or with her boyfriend, Travis. As long as I keep milk and cereal and frozen pizzas around, she’s covered.

I keep forgetting that it might be good for me to cook for myself. Nobody ever liked the same foods I do—my roasted veggie dishes and exotic soups. Time to indulge. On my list, I write,
Garlic, marinated pepper strips, lemon juice, whole pepper. Frozen quiches. Cheddar (the good one), Triscuits.

I won’t forget the single-serving cans of tuna, which have been the mainstay of my diet lately. It’s easy, and at least the cats get enthusiastic when they hear me pop the lid. I always pour the water off into a bowl for them. They are immensely grateful and I can glow over it for a good five minutes, standing at the counter eating out of the can.

I know, I know. Cats, tuna—this has all the earmarks of a Bad End.

The kettle whistles and I pour water into my cup, think maybe I’m just getting old. Bones thinning along with my skin, muscles withering away to nothing. I think of my granny, wizened down to broomstick size, and pull my sweater tighter around my torso.

Not old, not old, not old. Not at forty-six.
Forty-six is young these days, or at least just beyond the cusp of middle age.

Wind blusters against the windows, and I hear the sound of the chimes my new neighbor hung on his porch. His things appeared abruptly overnight three days ago, like the plumage of some exotic bird—a trio of chimes strung across the porch, a cluster of sticks and painted canvas in the side yard that promised quiet and other things, a foreign car I thought might be an English Mini, strange and small and orange. A ristra, cheery, bright red chiles in a string, hung by the door, nothing strange by itself. But it almost seemed that there was a new scent in the air, spice and chocolate and the promise of fresh yeast. Shannelle, the young mother across the street, said she’d glimpsed him, and widened her eyes to illustrate her amazement.

I move to the window to peer out. My breath makes a thick circle of condensation on the glass. At first I can only see the car, a blurry round like a giant pumpkin, so I wipe away the fog and cover my mouth with my fingers. As if called by my curiosity, he comes out on the porch.

Oh.

Despite the cold, he wears no shoes, and only some Ecuadorean-style pajama bottoms riding low on hips the color of a sticky bun. Hair runs in a fine line up the center of his belly like a stripe of cinnamon. Heavy silver bracelets cuff his dark wrists. A necklace of claws, something made in a jungle, hangs around his neck.

He stretches, showing the tufts of hair beneath his arms. I find myself holding my breath with
him, letting it out again only when he lowers his chin and, in an insouciant gesture, tosses back his hair to show his face. It looks good from this distance, a high brow and wide mouth. Hair, thick and wavy, pours down to his shoulders in a tangle of honey and butter.

I half expect him to look my way, feel my gaze like some magic being, but he only bends over to pick up a newspaper and goes back inside.

Lazy thing
, I think,
sleeping until past noon.

I carry my tea and soup into the dining room, put down a place mat on the table even though there’s no strict need for it. It’s not as if the table needs protecting—it’s ancient and beautiful, if scarred from twenty-some years of family dinners—but I like the homey look of the floral pattern against the wood. I think it might be for show, in case anyone happens by, a way to demonstrate that I’m doing just fine, but that’s okay, too. I get a matching napkin out of the drawer and center everything on the mat, look for a magazine to read, trying to recapture the sense of well-being such old rituals used to give me when Rick went off riding with his buddy Joe Zamora, and the kids were at friends’ houses or skating or whatever. In those days, time alone was a luxury—I’d put on some music no one else liked and fix some soup only I would eat, like my very special corn chowder, and read in the blissful aloneness.

But the evening looms. The house thunders with emptiness. How could my old life be over so suddenly that after years and years of never having a minute to draw my breath now I have so much
time that I feel myself sinking into it like quicksand, drowning in it?

A mother finished. A wife dismissed.

Cliché-city.

“God, Trudy,” I say to myself aloud, since there’s no one else to say it to. “You are boring me to death now. Do something.”

So I find the collection of Lorca’s poems, which I’ve been reading in an attempt to renew my acquaintance with Spanish—a passion I left behind somewhere. His work is appropriate to accompany the sound of Roberta’s singing that comes to me between bursts of wind. The houses are not that far apart and she’s got one of those big, black Southern gospel kinds of voices, like Aretha Franklin, though she pooh-poohs that comparison. I knew when I heard her that she was singing her husband Edgar’s favorites for him.

One last time.

Letting him go at last. He’s been in a diabetic coma for two weeks, since just after supper one Friday night. I was sitting with her when it happened—he’d been sick for a while, pieces of his body just eaten away by the disease—and she grabbed his hand, and cried out, “Edgar, don’t you
leave
me!” in such a heartbroken voice that I had to go home and cry about it later.

The hospice workers and the nurse who came in every day kept saying they didn’t know what in the world was keeping him alive. But I knew. So did Roberta.

The cry comes again, a wild piercing wail, the sound of her soul tearing in half. I put down my book, put my hand to my chest, and let it move
through me. In a minute, I will stand up and go to her.

In a minute.

In between, I let it swell in me, the freshened sorrow that her grief brings. My husband is not dead, just in love with somebody else, but I’m mourning him all the same, and my heart joins in Roberta’s howl, as if we’re a pair of coyotes. My wrist, out of the cast now for a couple of weeks, starts throbbing, and I put my other hand around it protectively.

Roberta.
I put on my shoes and coat and hurry over to her house.