The Juliet Stories (23 page)

Juliet? says the stepbrother. Now that he has begun saying her name, she thinks, he wants to say it again. She has to stop him saying it.

Your dad seems like a good person, she says, and regrets the words immediately. Could she have gone with more of a cliché, a conflicted cliché at that, a flimsy impression?
Seems
. Mom is happy, she says. Anyone can see that.

Maybe we should talk about something else, says the stepbrother.

Why aren’t you sitting with your family, all the relatives that came? Why aren’t you sitting with your sister?

He laughs, and she likes his laugh: it is shy. He says, Because I’d rather sit with you.

And that is when she thinks,
Uh-oh
.

She looks at the bartender to remind herself that he is there; she reassures herself that if she needs something, she can ask the bartender. The bartender, she thinks, and he smiles as if he’s heard.

Because she likes him. Shit. Not the bartender, of course, though she likes him too. No. The stepbrother.

She is afraid to look at him, as if she’s gone transparent.

She says, Excuse me, and slides off the stool, carrying her
drink. She’s lost her scarf, her shoes. She should walk to
her mother’s table. This would be a good moment, between the mains and dessert, when the gauchos are strumming and the restaurant swells with sound and laughter. There is a pause, a rare unspoiled chance, and she should use it.

But instead she skirts the room, steps into sand, towards the ocean. It is dark now, and outside their electrified haven the night is deeply black. The stars look like spilled salt. She walks towards the sound of water.

She thinks, I think he likes me too.

She thinks, I feel a little bit sick. Her feet meet water sooner than she expects. The tide has come in. She drinks the glass dry, the umbrella poking her cheek. No one comes for her. No one follows.

She thinks, So maybe he doesn’t like me.

———

She chooses a roundabout route to the bathrooms, picking her way in the shadows, holding the empty glass and hoping not to step on anything sharp, or alive.

Aunt Caroline is washing her hands at the sink. Juliet sets the glass on the counter and without a word chooses an empty stall and shuts and locks the door.

Now, how many drinks is that, Juliet? says Aunt Caroline. Are you keeping track? You don’t want to be sick in the morning or do anything foolish. When I was married to my first husband — that is, my only husband — I used to go out with his friends, and the wives would say, Drink, drink, Caroline, you have to, and like a sheep I would do it,
baa, baa
, I would drink with them, but I never liked it, I never really liked it, it was only that they told me to and so I did. Of course, I was weak when I was married to him. I did whatever anyone told me, and it wasn’t until later, until afterward, that I realized I don’t like to drink. I certainly don’t like to be drunk. And, Juliet, I don’t even like the taste of alcohol!

Fruit juice, Aunt Caroline says. Fruit juice, a little soda water, some ice.

You should think about it, Juliet. Think about your choices. Think about what you are doing to that beautiful young body of yours. Juliet? Are you okay in there? Juliet?

Juliet is fine. In all senses of the word, the senses she wishes to apply, she is
fuh-hine
. She says, I’m just taking a crap, Aunt Caroline.

Oh for God’s sake, says Aunt Caroline with genuine disgust. You are just like your mother.

Am I? thinks Juliet, who is not taking a crap. She waits for a while. Finally she says, Aunt Caroline? Thinking she might have quietly gone.

I’m still here, says her aunt in a singsongy voice. I’m waiting for you, Juliet.

Oh for God’s sake yourself, says Juliet, and stands and flushes.

I just want to give you a hug, says Aunt Caroline.

Let me wash my hands. Juliet takes her time, lathering and rinsing and elaborately drying, using one of the folded cloth towels set in a basket on the counter.

This can’t be easy for you, says Aunt Caroline as the hug begins, progresses, continues, elaborates. You and Emmanuel have been such good children, such good children. Juliet waits for it to be over. She waits for Aunt Caroline to spill her feelings as projected onto Juliet; Juliet will let them bounce like marbles onto the floor. Aunt Caroline never had children; she is saying this even as Juliet is thinking it. You and Emmanuel are like my children. Keith too. Keith was mine, too.

Juliet peeks to see what she imagines: the shape they make in the mirror, their posture humorous and sad. She wonders what Aunt Caroline wants in return. If Juliet knew, would she offer it? She does not think so. Adults always want something. Most often it is absolution and not forgiveness, it is reassurance and not questioning. Adults want confirmation of what they believe about themselves; they don’t want to be shown evidence otherwise, even while they insist on going around telling children: you’re wrong, and I know better.

Juliet thinks, Well, I’m an adult now. I’m not like that.

Aunt Caroline sighs, goes to a stall for toilet paper, blows noisily.

She says, No more alcohol for you tonight, Juliet.

Juliet smiles.

I mean it!

I know, says Juliet. She waits for Aunt Caroline to leave, thinking an exit might never be accomplished were it not for the entrance of cousins from the other side, three girls older than Emmanuel and younger than Juliet, giddy with sugar and with staying up past bedtime. Aunt Caroline shakes her head, beetles together her eyebrows in a warning sign, a reminder, and takes her leave.

Juliet exhales. She has forgotten, temporarily, the source of an underlying sensation of thrill and dread. She leans her hip against the counter with arms folded and lets the idea of him — the stepbrother — wash into her consciousness again, slowly, like a drug administered by mouth.

In open air — the shock of oxygen — she stumbles with giddiness to the pool side of the restaurant, which is fenced, the gate shut after dark; scratches her bare arm on something and almost falls.

Oh. Jesus. They are kissing, they are against the fence, away from the light, going at each other like, like, like a simile she doesn’t want to pursue. Euphemisms glide through her mind like ice dancers in inappropriate costumes. Is that a nipple, a butt cheek, I see before me? Doing the nasty, says a rich announcer voice in her head, deep and male.

Hey, she says. Hey, Mom. Hey, Jesse. She says it as much to stop the imaginary announcer’s voice as to call out to them, to interrupt.

Oh, I didn’t see you there, Juliet. I was just, we were just. Her mother laughs, panting. The two of them are fully clothed but unwilling to disentangle themselves. It is quite dark, but Juliet knows for certain that her stepfather’s hand is squeezing her mother’s breast.

I just wanted to say congratulations, says Juliet.

Oh, honey, oh, baby, that is so sweet. Her mother rubs her own cheek as if she is wiping away sudden tears. Oh, that is just . . . With pellucid excitement she flutters her hands, calling for Juliet.

Group hug, says Jesse and throws his arms wide.

There is nothing to do but submit. And it’s nice, Juliet lets herself think, it’s nice to be held. She thinks, I like this guy, he’s fine. Fuh-hine. She thinks, The difference between my mother and everyone else is that she goes ahead and does what makes her happy. Damn the world, damn the rest of us. I don’t hate her for it.

Hey, says Jesse, you’re an old soul. She’s an old soul, Gloria, I can see that. Takes after her mother.

Are you keeping an eye on Emmanuel? asks her mother, perhaps the first time she’s given him a thought all night. Do you know where he is?

I’ll check, says Juliet. She is done with the embrace, finished, embrace completed, and her mother is done too. It is only Jesse who would hang in a while longer, for who knows how long, waiting to see what might happen, surfing the good vibrations long after the tide has turned.

I like him, she thinks, but he’s a flake.

———

The owner is behind the bar, near the back entrance, drying glasses with a white towel.

Where’s the other one? Juliet asks. She says, He made me this perfect drink, rum with fruit juice and fruit, and —

Kitchen, says the owner, scrutinizing her. She blushes. He blends her drink in a cocktail shaker and pours it over ice, smooth as silk. No umbrella, no floating pineapple.

From where she stands, leaning elbows on polished wood, she can see her brother working his way through a waffle as if he’s performing a chore that requires deep deliberation. His eyelids are heavy. Though near him, the stepsister and stepbrother have turned away. The stepsister touches her throat in laughter. Juliet thinks, They are speaking in code, that is how well they know each other. The shorthand Juliet shares with Emmanuel is limited by the difference in their ages, by the things that she remembers and he does not; they have grown up in two different families.

Juliet’s family had a mother and a father, and three children, and dismay and uncertainty were held at bay by a series of sudden moves, dangerous leaps that carried them ahead of disaster, just out of reach.

Emmanuel’s family has a mother who lives apart, and a dead brother, and dismay and uncertainty are held in their father’s hand, and he is afraid to show them. Intuiting their father’s fear is more frightening than anything he could reveal, any unearthed body or living ghost.

Her mind feels heavy; it weighs down her skull, tilts her off balance as she swallows a sip of liquid. This drink, she thinks, is better than the last. She nods appreciation to the owner, who is watching. She can’t walk over there to her brother. She can’t invite conversation, or comparison. She thinks, I envy them.

She has forgotten why she likes her stepbrother, if indeed she does. When she looks at the nape of his neck from this distance, exposed and clean like a schoolboy’s, she feels nothing. She is staring at a stranger’s neck.

Emmanuel has seen her. He lifts one hand, bending back the wrist in a weak wave. She smiles but does not go to him. He does not seem to expect her to. She thinks, Who will tuck him into bed?

Juliet finds the boy, the bartender, behind the kitchen, leaning against the restaurant’s wall, smoking a cigarette that he extinguishes underfoot as soon as he sees her coming for him. He is wearing rubber sandals, cheap and thin, the kind someone in Canada might reserve for use in the change room of a fitness centre.

There is no escaping where we’re from, she thinks, feeling rather hopeless, losing her courage.

But he is thinking something else. He removes the drink from her hand, sets it beside the doorway, and inclines his head, inviting her to walk with him some little distance, beyond the light. She trusts his mental map of the landscape; he’s done this before. His palm alights on the curve of her lower back, slides around her hip to the front and pulls her against him. It is such tangled relief to be touched. This exchange is something she knows and understands and does not fear: the give and take between two people meeting in silence. She turns to him and her hands are beneath his open shirt, his heart a separate animal under her ear.

They might go on like this, they might fall to their knees, sink into the sand, carrying each other towards expectant and willing danger — imagine the shape of a night that never was, a future that will not be. They might go on like this, but for her mother’s amplified voice crackling through the loudspeaker, calling through the darkness, discovering Juliet and urging her return, delivering her to the fate that will be hers, to the self that hinders and drags on her — capable, sturdy, robust — that cannot be altered.

I have to go, she says. My mother.

She is forgetting that he does not speak English.

Mi madre
, she says.

His fingers are caught in her hair. It pulls, it hurts just a little to come apart, and she has to use her own fingers to brush through the strands, to release him.

She would reclaim her drink as she passes the open kitchen door, but it has spilled, the glass broken; she steps in it before she realizes. The stepbrother is coming for her. Stop, she says, glass. She stands amidst the mess in her bare feet, and he keeps coming. She looks down at his polished black shoes.

Aren’t you hot in those?

He lifts her without asking — Put your hands around my neck — and swings her out of the shards. Setting her down, he says, You’ve lost an earring.

Flustered, she checks her soles, flicks off a piece of glass that has not cut her. She says, Is this part of the plan? She means Gloria’s.

Is there a plan? he says. If he thinks there is not, he’s either misunderstood or he doesn’t know Gloria well enough yet.

The children — Juliet and Emmanuel and the stepbrother and stepsister — sit cross-legged on red tile before Gloria, separated from her by the microphone stand. She rocks in a chair, her guitar across her lap like a much-loved child, and she says, Once upon a time, this was a lullaby I sang to my three children. I give it to all of you as a gift, to welcome my new children, Anne and Mike, and to remember my lost child, my Keith, and for my own sweet Juliet and Emmanuel.

There is a swallowed sob from the audience. Aunt Caroline, thinks Juliet.

Her mother closes her eyes. Her throat is exposed, and Juliet admires the tanned skin stretched across her fit breastbone, her elegant arms. Her chosen bridal gown is light but not white, a full skirt whirling from the boned bodice, appropriate for a second marriage and a beach wedding. Juliet experiences a shot behind the eyes, a burst of pride at her mother’s unexpected accomplishments, her feats of transformation.

The lullaby is an original song, written for this occasion. In the same instant that Juliet knows it, she forgives her mother for the lie, for the created memory of a past that does not exist and never did. Like her mother, she wishes that it did, and she wishes that by wishing alone any of them could make happen what should have happened. She closes her eyes and touches her fingers to the empty earlobe. She thinks, Here is a gift, so take it. She thinks, A gift is a gift: you don’t get to choose, whether it be a secret kept, a polite falsehood, a book you’ve already read, or a sweater that does not fit. You open it, you open your mind, you do not think about how you might use it or whether indeed it is of any use to you
.
You understand that the giver is giving you what she can, that
she is doing her best.