Honored Guest (Vintage Contemporaries) (16 page)

He said that Stephanie had flushed a live kitten down the toilet and he had no money to pay the plumber.

“You haven’t the money to pay a plumber?” Lilly said, bewildered. She rubbed the blood into her arm. Gently, without looking at it, she smeared it into her skin.

Stephanie was playing with the kitten and the kitten nipped her or perhaps it was that the kitten took food from her plate and she was angry and wanted to punish it. “Of course there is no excuse for such a thing,” Eduardo said. “She should not have done it. A very ugly thing to do. She does not have an earache, she is being punished. I wanted to spare your feelings. I know you are charmed by Stephanie. You do not want to know this.”

“I must speak to her, Eduardo. You must bring her here and let me talk to her right away. Does she know this is wrong?”

“She says she is sorry,” he said dismissively.

“She is so gentle,” Lilly protested, “so respectful of everything, the books, the flowers. She fills Amiga’s water dish. I find it difficult to believe she would do such harm.”

“I knew you would not believe it,” Eduardo said.

“I must see her. I will pay for the plumber. You must return as usual next week, every day, with Stephanie.”

“I’m not asking for money. Sometimes you misunderstand me. But I must work digging a swimming pool for a month so that I can pay the plumber.” He spoke stubbornly, as though spellbound.

“I will give you the money you need now. Please pay attention to what I am saying.”

He nodded. “You’re bleeding,” he said.

Stephanie ran to Lilly and hugged her legs.

“Hello, dear,” Lilly said, “my little dear.”

The child giggled and clutched her. “I want to read, I want to color, I want to make those little cupcakes with the coconut.”

“Stephanie, we must … Listen to me,” Lilly said. “I want to ask you something.”

“Sí,”
Stephanie said solemnly.

“The dress I gave you, why do you never wear it?” How shameful of me, Lilly thought, but I don’t know how to begin. I am proceeding but I don’t know how to begin. The child is slipping into the dark and no one knows, that dreadful Eduardo certainly doesn’t know. He is concerned only with the
cost to him! she thought with disgust. The cost of a plumber! While this child was slipping unconscious into the dark.

“My mama gave it to my sister. She said it was too big for me.”

“And do you think it is too big?” Lilly said quietly, purposelessly.

“I’m sorry that the dress is not mine,” Stephanie said.

“Do you know what it means to be sorry?” Lilly said in the same lazy, idle tone.

Stephanie patted Lilly’s hands with her own small ones. “Could we color? Do you still have the crayons?”

“Do you want to draw?”

“No, color. There is a book you let me color in.” She looked at Lilly worriedly. “Have you forgotten?”

They kept Stephanie’s books and playthings in a bureau with a locking drawer. The key was on a ribbon on top of the bureau. The child liked the ceremony of unlocking the drawer. She liked the embroidered corners of the napkins they put on a pewter tray when they had lemonade.

“I have my own
hamaca
now,” Stephanie said. “I do not have to sleep with my sister.”

Danny walked past and smiled at them.

“What else has happened at your house?” Lilly asked. “You know I have not seen you for a long while. Have you been sick?”

“I am strong,” Stephanie said, placing the books on a table and arranging the crayons in a pleasing fan shape. “I am never sick. Sometimes Mama is.” She turned the pages of the coloring book. “That one is smudged,” she said critically. “That was when I was a baby.”

“Not so many weeks ago,” Lilly said. “Why don’t you color this page?”

“Gatito,”
Stephanie said. “The kitten.”

She set to work while Lilly watched her raptly. She was learning ignorance, Lilly marveled. She had begun to be false, false to herself and others. Lilly would not allow this, she would not. This was the child of whom Barbara had said, “Why, she thinks you hung the moon!” She had a responsibility to this child.

“Is that your kitten?” Lilly asked.

“Sí.”
Stephanie was humming to herself. “He is black. He has white ears. He likes cupcakes.” She selected another crayon. “I don’t know. I don’t really have a kitten. I have a
hamaca.”

“Stephanie,” Lilly said. She grasped the child’s hands and held them fast. She felt them softly crumpling in her own. “You must not pretend this did not happen.”

Night. It was nothing if not reliable. Again, a single massed figure. A threat made material, followed by the ritual of crying out, the lamp rocking on the table as she fumbled for the switch, the little dog Amiga limping away, fearing her …

Instead, Lilly only gripped the sheets and, turning, pressed her face against the wall. Her eyes were wet. If it wasn’t a dream, she reasoned, she wouldn’t even feel it.

It was time for a drink in the garden. She didn’t drink wine because the sulfites were considered to be bad for her condition.
She had a tequila over ice. She nibbled an almond. Eduardo sat comfortably with them, drinking from a bottle of Squirt.

“We’re celebrating,” Danny said. “Eduardo has bought a car—a VW one year younger than Eduardo.”

“It is the first car in my family,” Eduardo said gravely, without looking at Lilly. “No one in my family has ever had a car.”

“We looked at eight before Eduardo decided,” Danny said.

“You did all the paperwork,” Eduardo said. “It was difficult paperwork.”

“But it was you who made such a good down payment with your savings.” Danny said to Lilly, “I told him we’d help him out with the rest.”

“I will be working harder but that is only right,” Eduardo said submissively.

“I can hardly see you working any harder than you do,” Danny said.

“My first errand in my beautiful car was to take Stephanie home. We stopped for ice cream.”

“She was terribly upset about something yesterday,” Danny said. “What was that all about?”

Eduardo grimaced and squeezed his belly. “Stomachache.”

“She’s a sweet little girl,” Danny said.

“Then I drove back in my fantastic car,” Eduardo said. “That is when I bought the tequila. My gift.”

“It’s very smooth,” Danny said.

Eduardo grinned. He was happy about the car. He was going to take good care of it.

T
HEY HAD BEEN
told about it ecstatically by a police officer eating a tamale at a cafe near the Arizona/New Mexico border.

“I just went out there in all that white sand and got me a dune and went up on it and looked and looked and just let it sink in, and I never saw anything like it, never felt anything like it. I think I could stay out there in that white sand for a real long time and I don’t know exactly why.”

“It doesn’t sound like something you’d want to do too often,” Richard said. The policeman frowned. Then he ignored them.

Back in the car, Janice wanted to go there immediately. They were having a look at the Southwest on their way to Santa Fe. They were both wearing khaki suits, and Richard had a hand-painted tie he had paid a great deal of money for around his neck.

They drove to the White Sands National Monument, paid the admission and went in. The park ranger said, “We invite
you to get out of your car and explore a bit, climb a dune for a better view of the endless sea of sand all around you.”

They drove slowly along a loop road. Everything was white and orderly. It was as if the dunes had a sense of mission. Here and there, people were fervently throwing themselves down them and laughing.

“Do you want to get out?” Richard said. “I’ll wait in the car.”

Janice felt that she was still capable of awe and transfiguration and was uncomfortable when, together with Richard, she felt not much of anything. She was distracted with the knowledge that they were on a loop road. She studied the dunes without hope. As they were leaving, they saw something small and translucent, like a lizard, stagger beneath their wheels, and they both remarked on that.

“I don’t know what that policeman was talking about,” Richard said.

“He was trying to express something spiritual.”

“Don’t you get tired of that out here? Everything’s sacred and mysterious and for the initiated only. Even the cops are after illumination. It wears me out, to be quite honest.”

She wished she had gotten out of the car. She hadn’t even gotten out of the car. She was wearing high heels. “Let’s go back,” she said. “Let’s try it again.”

“Janice,” Richard said.

After some miles he said, “I forgot to take a leak back there.”

“Really!” she exclaimed.

“I’m going to pull into this rest stop.”

“To take a leak! How good!” she said. She fixed an enthralled expression upon him.

Outside, the heat was breathtaking and the desert had a slightly lavender cast. People were standing under a ramada, speaking loudly about family members who smoked like chimneys and lived into their nineties. Farther away, someone was calling to a small dog. “Peaches,” they called, “you come here this instant.” The dog seemed sincere in its unfamiliarity with the name Peaches. This was clearly a name the dog felt did not indicate its true nature, and it was not going to respond to it.

The road led past the toilets and ramadas through a portion of landscape where every form of plant life was explained with signs, then back out onto the highway. Janice walked along it toward a group of vending machines. She loved vending-machine coffee. She felt it had an unusual taste and wasn’t for everyone. While waiting for the cardboard cup to sling itself down and fill with the uncanny liquid, she noticed a chalky purple van parked nearby. Two beautiful children stood beside it with their arms folded, looking around as though they had a certain amount of authority. They were rather dirty and were lanky and blond and striking. A man and woman were rummaging around inside the open van. Both the man and the boy were barefoot and shirtless. The woman, who had long, careless hair, said something to the girl, who climbed inside just as the man triumphantly produced what appeared to be an empty pizza box. Janice could hardly take her eyes off them. She finished the coffee, which was now cold and tasted even more peculiar, and returned to Richard and their rental car, which had a small scratch on the hood that she had taken great pains to point out to the agency so that they would not be held responsible for it. The grille had collected a number of butterflies. Without speaking, she got in and shut the door. She’d like
to tell Richard how much she refrained from saying to him, but actually she refrained from saying very little.

As they passed the van, the man raised the scrap of box on which was now printed in crayon
PLEASE: NEED GAS MONEY
.

The colon in this plea touched Janice deeply. “Richard,” she said, “we must give that family some money.”

The man held the sign close to his chest, just above an appendectomy scar, as the children looked stonily into space.