Still Life with Plums (8 page)

That night, without thinking, I slid a folded pillow under the covers until it rested on my flat belly. Then I caressed the soft mound, whispering, “Shh, shh,” until I drifted off to sleep.

Hector now spent his days sitting on a stool just outside the studio, watching several different versions of Maranga being pulled out of the students’ canvases. He still stared for minutes without blinking, sometimes quarters of an hour, but at home he stopped his staring altogether.

Now he paced, back and forth, in front of the wall of faces.

It was a nervous kind of pacing, as if any minute he might break into a run. It reminded me of Loco Lindy, my dead father’s
unbreakable mare. One minute she would be nibbling tender green shoots. The next she would gallop across the field pitching dirt clods behind her.

The uncles took this as a sign that Hector was ready for work at last.

“Uncles,” I said, “he still does not speak.”

“He is ready, Ana,” Uncle Luis said, and one more thing I wasn’t expecting, “and soon you will be able to quit that cleaning job and stay home where you belong.”

I could tell by three stern pairs of eyebrows that their minds were made up.

What was I to do with no job? Stay home and pick up crayons and cigar butts? Scoop up little dog turds from the yard? It wasn’t enough to fill up my hollowness. I needed something, anything, to busy my hands, my mind. But to tell you the truth, lately the ache had been growing, or the job had been shrinking. I’m not sure which.

Felipe, what should I do? Suddenly I realized with a cringe that I hadn’t asked his advice in quite some time.

I went to the alcove to confer with my spouse. Hector was pacing, as usual, but I felt certain he wouldn’t mind the intrusion. I edged as close to the wall as possible to stay out of his path, and told Felipe the bad news. Today, however, he gave me nothing. Not a word. Not a blink.

“Aw, come on Felipe,” I said. “Don’t be so tight-lipped.”

Still he stared straight ahead.

“Maybe you’re busy,” I finally said. “I’ll come back tomorrow.”

Which I did, and the next day, and the day after that, but for six days he said nothing.

Stumped, I crossed my arms and stole a glance of the twins. “Your father has been in quite a mood,” I said, but their eyes were as vacant as their father’s.

I jumped when Pocked María opened the door.

“Sorry,” she said. “I was looking for Hector.”

“Hector?” I said, scanning the room. I hadn’t even noticed his absence. “Try the bathroom?”

“Good idea,” she said, and left.

I looked once more at my husband, my children, but they just stared through me like snapshots. Two dimensional, flat-finished. That’s all.

I left the alcove and shut the door tight.

María leaned out the front door calling, “Hector! Hector!”

“Not in the bathroom?” I said.

She pulled back in, “No. Or the kitchen. The bedrooms. It’s dark outside, Ana. Where could he be?”

“I’ll take a look around the yard,” I said, slipping past her. Scratching my elbow, I stepped from the porch and walked around the house calling, “Hector! Hector!” Gringa came to me instead, ramming her cold nose into my ankle. I scooped her up and scratched her forehead. “What have you done with our Hector?” I said, her tail thumping against my side. I set the dog down and started walking our route to the gallery. Where else did Hector know to go?

So this was it. Soon there would be no more walks to work. The uncles would put an end to my job, and poor Hector would be tucking flyers under windshield wipers or buffing fenders at the car wash.

Still, it felt good to be out in the warm night under bright stars. I had never taken this route in the dark. I peered in windows at the Gonzales children gathered in their kitchen for a late supper. The father hoisted a toddler into a high chair while his wife flailed a dish towel and yelled. Two houses down, through the screen door, I could see the Medina boys lying belly down on the floor, heads propped on their arms watching TV in the dark. Across the street Spinster Avila sat alone on her sofa crocheting pot holders. On her porch, dozens of
wind chimes clinked out soft melodies. Farther down, Mango’s lilacs were particularly sweet.

At the gallery I was surprised to find the front door not only unlocked, but wide open. Easing inside the dark room I paused to listen. The moon spilled eerie shadows across the purple-breasted women and I forced out a shaky “¿Hola?”

Nothing.

I walked toward the hall. Widow Greenbaum was sitting on Hector’s stool in a florescent beam cast from the studio doorway. She turned at the sound of creaking floorboards and reached out one hand to me while she dabbed a Kleenex to her eyes with the other. I slipped my hand into hers and she squeezed it too tight.

“What’s wrong?” I said. She tilted her head toward the studio, directing me to look inside.

Hector.

He knelt on the floor, bent over a canvas. Paint tubes were scattered by his side, the colors spilling, blending right on the linoleum. With his left hand he traced the scars on his neck, up his jaw. The half ear. The dead eye. With his right fingers he scooped up orange, purple, green, whatever colors he sensed were right and slid them onto his painting. His motions were timid, even holy. Widow Greenbaum nodded in silence as if she knew exactly what each dab of black, each magenta streak meant.

It was too much to see. For several minutes all I could do was squeeze my eyes shut and listen to the sliding of paint. When I finally opened my eyes what I saw was Maranga. Not on Hector’s canvas, but lining the walls. Dozens of versions of that beautiful cocoa woman, her belly swollen with so much life.

I became aware of a pulse in my own belly. It was a puzzle and I looked at Hector, so calm in his creation, and Widow Greenbaum, who seemed to understand something about this moment I did not.

“I must go,” I said with an urgency that surprised me. Widow Greenbaum nodded, but continued to stare at Hector and blot at the corners of her eyes. I doubted if Hector was even aware of my presence.

Pushing outside I looked up into groupings of stars, bright planets, the edge of the moon, the same moon that sliced the Guatemalan sky. For the first time I was remembering my family instead of imagining them. They were swaying on the porch swing Felipe made when I was pregnant. My daughter snuggled at her father’s right side clutching her frayed blanket. My son curled at his left, noisily sucking a thumb. Felipe would make up stories about Rosa the goat in a rhythmic voice that would lull his children toward dreams, and suddenly Guatemala seemed much farther away than 2200 miles and seven years.

I found myself standing before Mango’s nursery, my face buried deep in his shrubs. Through the front window I could see him pruning a generous spider plant, offering tender apologies before clipping each stem.

I peeled a cluster of lilac and held it to my face to feel the lavender blossoms against my lips and inhale the thick sweetness deep into my lungs.

It was a potion.

And suddenly I could see myself stepping up onto Mango’s porch, rapping on the door. Under the yellow bug light his mouth would curve into a smile as I invited him outside for a chat. Then perhaps, if the moment was right, we would sit on
his
porch swing along with my ghosts, and discuss his fertile garden, my green thumb, and trade secrets well into the night.

Betty sits in the passenger seat with an aluminum foil swan on her lap. Twisted inside are leftovers of the supper she paid for. She bought Jeff’s too, and now he sits behind the wheel, looking out the front window at the ribbon of I-45 South rushing toward him, at mile markers passing, at the thin strip of pink light on the horizon, as his wife slowly wrings the swan’s neck.

“I know where you’re going,” Betty says.

Jeff grips the wheel tighter. “I thought it would give us closure,” he says. “Isn’t that what this night is about?”

“I don’t have time for this, Jeff. I told the sitter I’d be home by nine.”

“Sitter-schmitter,” he says, trying to grin at her. Trying to act as if he’s not worried about the babysitter, about scalding bath water, about sneaked-in, child-molesting boyfriends, about shaken baby syndrome though the baby is three and a half. The grin comes off as a smirk in the car’s dim interior and Betty huffs and looks out her side window.

Jeff settles into the beaded seat cover, the same cover he sat on ten years ago when he drove Betty to Texas City that first time. The same
car, too, a two-toned Monte Carlo he inherited from his father, with 112,000 miles less on the odometer. Without the Juicy Juice stains on the back seat that spot remover would not, could
not
remove even after Jeff’s repeated applications; no sour milk and baby spit smells that still linger though he sprinkled baking soda and vacuumed until every Melba toast crumb, every dried Spaghettio was safely sucked inside the Dust Buster. It was an eager car, then. New tires anxious to eat up mile after mile. Now it’s just part of Jeff’s settlement along with the microwave; the twenty-inch TV; the alphabetized collection of baseball cards that he decreased in value by laminating, but
how else are you supposed to keep them clean!
Betty is selling the house her geological drafting job paid for. She gets the rest of the furniture, the two-year-old Dodge Caravan, and Stephanie. Betty gets Stephanie.

But tonight Jeff pretends they’re driving back through time. He sucks in his gut as if that’ll lighten the twenty-three pounds he’s gained since the marriage. If he doesn’t look at her, he can envision the svelte, pre-baby woman who rode beside him all those years ago. Happy, jittery, elated about her first trip to the Gulf. She had just moved to Houston four months before. Made the long trip from West Virginia all by herself with a baseball bat on the car seat beside her for protection. He remembers turning onto the Texas City dike at twilight, passing Latino fisherman icing down fish, packing up rods and reels. Others just settling into lawn chairs, breaking out po’ boy sandwiches and bottles of Corona, metal coolers beside them waiting for their nighttime catch. Jeff parked at the end of the dike and he and Betty got out and sat on the car’s hood.
Amazing
, Betty had said, scanning the oil refineries just across the water, an Erector Set city of gridwork outlined by millions of lights, flare stacks shooting flames.
It’s like Christmas
, she had said. Jeff pointed out cooling towers, transformers, catalytic cracking units—cat crackers, he called them, and distillation columns, the
largest structures of all, some over two-hundred feet high.
How do you know all their names?
Betty asked.
I worked here one summer
, he said, neglecting to mention that he got fired his first week for spending six hours meticulously painting a railing that his boss said should have taken thirty minutes. Jeff said that though you couldn’t see them, there were probably men out there climbing stairways around columns, or clanking up catwalks in steel-toed boots, troubleshooting, making sure everything was smoothly running.
Climbing in the dark?
Betty asked, eyes straining to make out tiny silhouettes against the lights.
They must be brave
, she said. Jeff remembers the look of utter awe on her face. Admiration.
It’s nothing
, he said.
I did it a million times
.

“It got cold,” Jeff says now, remembering how the wind picked up. How waves crested into white peaks, how gusts buffeted the freshly waxed car and whipped Betty’s then-long hair across her face and his, sending them into the back seat where Betty shivered until he got his beach blanket from the trunk and wrapped it tightly around them.

“What?”

“The first time we came here. It got cold.”

“Oh,” Betty says. “I don’t remember.”

“How can you not remember? It was the first time we—you know.” He recalls laying her back against the gray upholstery, neatly folding his jacket into a pillow for her head. How it should have been clunky and awkward and cramped, but it wasn’t. At all.
A good fit
, Betty had said when it was over and they lay there entwined.
We’re a good fit
. He twirled the little silver ring around her index finger until it twisted off in his hand. He held it before her.
See this?
She nodded.
I’m going to climb to the top of that distillation column and put it on top. Tomorrow, one of the workers will find it and say to his buddies: Look at this. Some brave fool must sure be in love
. Betty kissed his earlobe as the refinery lights flickered in her eyes.

Tonight Betty says, “This is stupid. The movers are coming tomorrow and I haven’t even packed up the kitchen.”

Betty is moving back to West Virginia. To White Sulphur Springs to be near her parents and the Greenbrier Resort where she waitressed as a teen. Jeff once asked her if she knew about the resort’s secret which had recently been exposed: the super-classified bunker built beneath it for the president and high-ranking officials in case of nuclear attack.
No
, she had said. But she couldn’t wait to take the tour, to go through the fat metal door and see the operating room and rows of bunk beds and the incinerator meant to dispose of contaminated bodies. She thinks she dated an FBI agent disguised as a maintenance worker.
His first name was an initial
, she said.
R. That has to mean something
.

In less than a week she’ll be gone. Her brother David is flying down to help with the driving. To speed through six states and, Jeff thinks, deliver Betty to Bo, her high school sweetheart though
he’s just a good friend
, says Betty. Jeff wonders about that, about Betty’s last trip to West Virginia without him. Her father’s quadruple bypass and of course she had to be there. Dutiful daughter and all that. She stayed one week, two, extended it to three and a half. When she returned, fat blue envelopes started arriving in the mail. From Bo. When the first letter came Jeff tore it open and read innocuous page after page, but that didn’t stop him from flapping it in Betty’s face when she came home from work. She said:
He’s a whole time zone away, for God’s sake. He’s going through a divorce and he just needs an ear
. Jeff wonders which other of his wife’s body parts Bo needs.