Small Damages (9 page)

TWENTY-SIX

I find her in her brown dress in the kitchen, a plate of headless anchovies to one side and onions and peppers frying up on the stove. She doesn’t turn, she doesn’t scold me, she doesn’t warn me away from Esteban. She is Estela, the teacher, showing off her English.

“You see,” she says. “You watch.”

The onions are going transparent in the pan. The red and green peppers look like Christmas. When the frying is done, Estela takes a wide wooden spoon and scoops the fried things over half of the anchovies, then fits a second anchovy on top of each first, like she is making a sandwich. Onto a flat tray she pours out a little hill of flour, then drags each sandwich through, and now each sandwich is dipped into a bowl of beaten egg and put back into the pan.

“
Anchoas rellenas
,” she says, turning at last. “Were you watching?”

I nod.

“You will make them yourself. A few weeks, and you will make them.”

“For another party?”

“For to prove that you can. How was Seville?”

“They were throwing flowers from the rooftop.”

“Of course, and what else?”

“They put oranges in their bathtubs.”

“Not so strange, and what else?”

“And I met Adair.”

“And?”

“And,” I say. “And.” I lift my shoulders, let them drop.

Estela flips the anchovies, sandwich by sandwich; nothing sticks. The fried-oil steam rises, sags up her hair. “Everybody loves Adair,” she says, finally, and I am sure that it is true, and I understand why it is, but there is too much to say, so I say nothing, and something about Estela changes in that nothing, some wall comes down, some gentleness—some understanding, maybe. She looks at me, and I don’t look through her. She doesn’t force me to conclusions about Adair or Javier or any of it. She doesn’t say,
So, have you had your questions answered?

The herbs have been rinsed and dried and cut into their pieces. The prosciutto has been slivered thin. A round of beef is sitting out, soaking in some juices. Estela finishes the last anchovy sandwich, wipes her hands down her apron, and pulls out a chair at her tiny, beat-up table. She lets her elbows drop and her big arms hang, and now she traces her finger over a long trench in the wood. “This table,” she says at last, “is old as I am. Older, maybe.” She shakes her head, pulls her fingers through her hair. “So much,” she sighs, “losting to the old days.”

“Like what, Estela?” I ask. I pull out the second chair, sit at an angle to her, grateful that she is not angry, grateful that she is talking, not instructing, grateful that she is sitting here—not banging, not slicing, not rearranging, not testing, not glaring out on the Gypsies who have messed with all her parties. Maybe the storm has washed through her. Maybe something has happened with Luis. But Estela isn’t angry, and she isn’t demanding, and I want her to tell me a story. I want us to stop bitching at each other.

“Like the puppets,” Estela goes on, “that would come through town—Don Cristóbal and Miss Rosita. Like my mother, splashings of Jerez on her dress. Like the
churros
that they sold in the streets. Like the baskets of figs on the boys’ backs. Like the girl I saw once, being carried from town to town—her hair braiding and her best dress on, and she was dead, but she was floating. Good God,” she says, sighing loudly. “
Santa Maria, madre de Dios
. All of it gone.”

“But Luis is still here. And you are.”

“We were young once,” she says. “Oh, we were young. Young and foolish, and then Franco came, and no one could be young again, and there were priests without churches and landowners without land, and teachers selling charcoal in the streets, and Spain wasn’t ours anymore, and there were no wicker boats, and I couldn’t find Luis.” A wide tear settles in the corner of Estela’s eye. She puts a fist to it. She sits, not talking, and I don’t talk either, and a fly has come to the trench on the table that her finger has been tracing. Outside, in the courtyard, I hear the Gypsies settling in—someone laughing, someone pulling out the drum, someone making a
rasgueado
and turning aro
und the sound, and when I look through the open door to the earth beyond, I see Rafael stomping at the dust at his feet and the dust rising like fog.

Estela has turned her head too; she’s watching the courtyard. Watching Joselita and the drum, Angelita and her dress, Arcadio with his long-necked guitar. Now she pushes back her chair and stands. She moves her fingers through her hair, tugs at the lobe of her ear. “Something came for you when you were gone,” she says. “I left it on your dresser.”

“Do you need help, Estela?”

“No,” she says. “We’re done.”

“Are you sure?”

“I am sure. Go find your note. Go get some rest.”

The dresser mirror is a flat plate of rusty glass that freckles my face with its stains. I find the postcard there, tucked in—pressed into the mirror’s frame, picture side out. Stone Harbor at sunset. A line of gold across the sea and a gull cutting the gold with its wings, and at the edge of the sea is a girl dressed in white. When I slip the card out from the corner of the frame, I read its mirrored words backward: .uoy rof ti gnivas er’eW .llehs tcefrep a dnuof eillE—Ellie found a perfect shell. We’re saving it for you.

I turn it over, and I turn it over, and that’s all there is: The sea. The gull. The girl in white. The news about Ellie’s shell.

Have you answered him?

Not yet.

Do you think you might?

I close my eyes and see the Jersey shore. I see Andrea in her black bikini on her hot-pink towel. I see Tim and Kevin and the bocce balls—Kevin winning. I see Tim telling Kevin that his luck is running out and Tim wearing that white smear on his nose. On Tim’s shoulders are freckles the size of continents. His knees are salamanders.

Ellie is wearing her same orange bikini from the ninth grade. She’s slicing the beach air with her skinny bones. She’s the first thing you see, across the wooden planks, over the sand dunes.

You don’t see ocean or umbrellas or sock kites let up into the sky. You see Ellie—the dark black fringe of her hair, the Popsicle orange of her bikini, the bright Barney flip-flops on her feet. You see the spinning disk of the flopped gold hat she’s been wearing since she was twelve. You see Ellie, beach artist, carving out her sculpture of the day, finding her spot at the high-tide line, where the sand goes from wet dark to light. She tests her mix, crumbles fistfuls, gets the sand all clumped together. “Oh, my precious mortar sand,” she says, and she shovels that sand out and piles it high, digging trenches all around so that she can win against the sea, and making you guess, making you wait, and you go out into the ocean and sleep on your raft, or you play horseshoes and Frisbee or toss, or you fall asleep beneath the tent of a paperback book, and all along, Ellie is working on her sculpture, like it is the most important thing there ever was, like she will never ever have to decide what to do with a baby she didn’t expect to have too soon.

“I need clamshells,” Ellie says. “I need those little twiggy sticks.” Whatever. Ellie is a sand sculpture rock star—carving out sand cars you can practically drive, packing out mini roller coasters, tattooing the beach with these funny cartoon faces, and going at it all afternoon. You can never leave the beach until Ellie is done. You can never see what is coming. You will never know where her ideas came from, or how she figures out the physics of the sand.

She’s not supposed to be that smart, but Ellie is.

You can tell Ellie things; I should have.

“I have found my calling,” she says, and she doesn’t even mind that her calling is a vanishing. That she has nothing at all, once the sea rolls in, and right now the sea is rolling in, and you don’t want to watch, but you do—you watch the ocean pool in at her trenches. You see it split at the fortress walls. You know that nothing will stop it, and the tide comes in hard, and the trenches fill up, and the little kids who have been standing near throw themselves against the froth waters and cry, but not Ellie. Ellie doesn’t cry. She fixes the hat on her head and rinses off her Barney flip-flops and throws all her tools into the orange bucket, and she says, “We should go for a swim.”

She says, “Sand castles don’t last.”

She says, “Sand castles can’t be trusted.”

She said, “What’s wrong?” and I did not trust myself to tell her.

Outside my window, in the front courtyard, Joselita sits like a queen in a blue-hemmed dress and Angelita is wearing red, the flowers of a prickly pear pinned to her head; she must have lost that paper flower. She looks for me now in the window, finds me, touches her eye, as if to ask if I am seeing better now, and before I know how to answer, Rafael arrives by way of another door with a bottle in one hand, a bunch of glasses in a basket looped over his arm. Everything looks new inside the rain wash, and it’s Arcadio who starts the song, Bruno who makes the song stronger, Luis who wanders into the courtyard now and sees me at the window, and now they all turn to face me, and they sing a Gypsy song for an American girl. Old words that feel brand-new:

I am not from this country

Nor was I born here;

Fate rolling, rolling, rolling,

Brought me all this way.

I go alone into the fields,

Go there to weep.

I seek solitude

Since my heart is so heavy

With pain.

“Ay! Ay!” Luis cries, and now the chimney stork swoops down and flies so close that Luis reaches up, as if he could touch the white bird’s belly. Both hands, Luis reaches, but the bird flies off—and Luis laughs to himself, sits down, as if just trying were proof enough of life’s funny goodness. Suddenly I’m remembering my dad, the trip we took to Hawk Mountain, when my mother couldn’t be bothered. We’d driven the hour and a half and parked, and we’d walked, and everything had seemed silver or a hazy version of purple, and the rocks of Kittatinny Ridge had fallen down the valley’s side. Ice Age rocks, my dad had said. He had his camera, and I had my camcorder, and what I wanted was to try to stop bird motion, to freeze wing song in a frame. To catch the turkey vulture in its thermal or the eagle in the wind.

We climbed to the high rocks on the North Lookout and sat. Dad pointed out red-tailed hawk and broad-winged hawk and sharp-shinned hawk and goshawk. The more the wind blew, the more the sky filled with birds, and I zoomed in and scanned and fought foreground over background and never put my camera down, but I did not find my focus. Everything I filmed that day cluttered and blurred. It told no story.

Later I asked my dad to show me the photos that he’d taken. He took me down into his darkroom, showed me what he had. It was me on the rocks and me picking at laurel, me taking portraits of birds, my eyes in a squint.

“Why?” I asked him. “Why didn’t you photograph the birds?”

“You have to know your subject,” he said. “You have to know what cannot be forgotten.”

The day is collapsing into dusk. The Gypsies in their white shirts are the only lamps. The moon is coming in like a pan on fire. Estela bangs through the kitchen door with her anchovies, and behind her now comes Esteban, a plate in each hand. He sits beside Luis, on the far side of Miguel. He fits his hat on his lap, and I can’t breathe, I can’t even see through the blur.

“Kenzie,” Estela calls, “come here.”

But I come only when I can, when I stop crying. The sky has reversed itself by then. The meal has been passed down and eaten.

“They want me to tell you the story of flamenco,” Miguel says when I reach the table, the chairs, the love seat, the things that are piled up and sloppy. Esteban stands and pulls out a chair. I lower us into it, you and me, then look toward Estela, who stands within her kitchen, her arms crossed below her chest, her eyes guarded.

“Flamenco,” Miguel says, “is the harmony of the untrue relations. It is the rules, and the rules getting broken.”

Tell her we are descendants from Cain, Joselita says, in Spanish. Tell her we are the exiled. That every song begins with pain. And ends there. Tell her that. She kicks her feet out from the hem of her skirt and fixes the half barrel on her lap, her skin dark and loose as melted chocolate.

“There are the small songs, the
cante chico
,” Miguel tells me instead. “The
bulerías, alegrías, fandangos gitanos.
And then there is the deep song,
cante jondo
—the
siguiriya gitana,
the
soleá.
These Gypsies here, Kenzie—Luis’s friends—they are famous for their
cante jondo.
”

For tearing our throats out, Rafael says, in bars. For letting our songs possess us. Tell her that.

“Only to the earth do I tell my troubles,” Arcadio sings softly, “for nowhere in the world do I find anyone to trust.”

“If my heart had windowpanes of glass,” Bruno sings the next line, “you’d look inside and see it crying drops of blood.”

“These Gypsies, they are the famous,” Miguel says. “They are starting very young; they played for Lorca. They had
duende.
Have
duende. Sí?
”

“
Duende
?” I ask.

A struggle, Esteban tells me.

Tell her what
duende
does, Angelita says to Miguel. Tell her that.

Duende
is power, Esteban says. It’s bigger than us.

Rafael rasps through a wail. Joselita pounds the half barrel so hard it will someday split into a million pieces. I wait for more from Miguel, but this seems to be it. Flamenco is broken rules, and Luis’s friends are famous, and Esteban is sitting here beside me, and I want him to lean, to touch me. Estela stands at the threshold, watching us.

“Now you know,” Miguel says.

“I guess.”

“Now you have been introduced.”

“Gracias.”

Luis leans toward Miguel, says something. Miguel leans in the other direction, toward me. “He wants you to look up and see the stars,” he says.

“I am,” I tell him.

It’s like the storm never was. The stars are closer than they ever are in Pennsylvania, and it seems to me that Luis and Miguel and Esteban and I and the cats and the lizards and the horses and, in her kitchen, Estela, are the prisoners of stars and of the Gypsies who have started again on a song. We are prisoners, together.