The Juliet Stories (28 page)

It is one of those very hot days in late summer when even the sky wants to lie down. Humid and languid, two children and their mother pool together and believe this might last forever: that is what the mother believes. Blue plastic Popsicle stems litter the porch steps behind them, and cut grass sticks to their hands; the children sun-flushed, compact, prepared to be delighted by the smallest surprise, and the mother, Juliet, at ease.

Shaded by their patch of young birch trees, they watch the cars go by. It is rush hour and the asphalt throngs. Across the street seems miles away.

Juliet is waiting, though without purpose, without knowing that what she waits for is a little twist of wire in the grass, sharpened silver, that will cut her life wide open.

Across the street are brick houses converted into student apartments. One has lost its original façade entirely, risen to three storeys, and taken over the entire lot, a sign permanently erected in its yard advertising rooms for rent. Oddly, this is the least vulgar, its walls sheltered by healthy trees, bicycles locked along its drive. The next house over is deformed by barnacle-like additions in cheap yellow siding. The buildings share a caretaker who spends her days, in all weathers, outside.

Juliet feels as if she knows the woman, their relationship supported by hand signals and smiles and indecipherable greetings called across the noisy street; but Juliet doesn’t even know her name.

The woman dyes her hair orange; the colour does not look unnatural on her, cut to her jaw. Juliet guesses her age to be about forty, though at moments she looks younger, and then again older. She lives in the uglier of the two buildings, the front yard of which is paved. To improve the space she plants bright annuals in the patch of earth between sidewalk and street and in pots set on the pavement, which is where she sits in her lawn chair to read books — not magazines, not newspapers. Juliet is not near enough to see the titles.

The woman is nowhere to be seen just now.

Instead, as they sit under the patch of birch trees, waiting, expecting nothing more than to count the passing cars and to remark upon their colours, a girl emerges. She bursts forth, rent with screams, out of the rotten mouth of the uglier building. She is deeply untidy, feet shod in dirty flip-flops, hair tangled and straggling, her body neither fat nor thin. Juliet does not recognize her, but there are many tenants and they come and go. At first she thinks her no more than a teenager, but as the girl howls and stamps around the paved yard, she ages, until she is as old as Juliet herself: approaching thirty, sailing past.

She is dancing with rage directly across the street from them.

The children have never seen anything like it. They sit quietly and watch and feel no danger. Finally, Lucy, the eldest, says, “I know that lady. She lives at Earl’s house.”

“Shh.” Juliet is surprised. “Our neighbour Earl?”

Earl lives across the street too, in the only unconverted house on the block. Like the caretaker, he enjoys sitting outside, and can often be found where he is now: on his porch steps, smoking and sketching in a notebook. He has no apparent occupation and a houseful of cats, but his property is tidy, his yard raked, his sidewalk swept; in winter he has crossed the street to help Juliet shovel her walk. Though it seems he and the caretaker would have much in common, they are not friendly with each other.

“Yes,” Lucy says, “she lives in the basement.”

“Are you sure?” Juliet whispers despite the noise of the traffic. “I think he lives all by himself.”

“Daddy and me saw her in the morning! A long time ago.”

This could mean yesterday or a month past.

“I believe you,” says Juliet. “I’m just surprised.”

A taxi slows and turns into the paved yard just as the caretaker appears, hugging an overflowing garbage bag. She throws it from porch to pavement and its contents spill. She throws another bag, and another, with great calm and in utter silence, her fixed smile less cheerful than demented.

Earl rises, stretches, wanders down the sidewalk, as if the timing of his approach were accidental. The girl flies at him, weeping for rescue, but Earl tilts his head, only half listening. Smiling, the caretaker gestures to the taxi driver to open his trunk, and the girl flies back, kneeling and wailing and shoving things into split black bags.

The caretaker comes to Earl and they stand together in the landscaped yard between their two residences.

“What are they saying?” asks Lucy. “Why is that lady crying?”

“I don’t know,” says Juliet. Walter, not yet two, crawls onto her outstretched legs like a slug and presses his head to her stomach, where inside there beats an extra heart, though none of them know it, not yet.

Juliet thinks, We are invisible.

The caretaker bends to pluck a weed from a lush bed. Whatever Earl says to her, it isn’t solicitous. It takes him about two seconds to say it. The caretaker folds the weed and puts it into her pocket.

“Where will she go?” Juliet says out loud.

“What’s happening?” Lucy turns to her mother.

“We really don’t know,” says Juliet. At this moment the caretaker is sturdily stuffing bags into the taxi’s trunk while the girl fights her.
Tooth and nail
. A thin scratch of blood rises on the caretaker’s cheek.

“Why not?” cries Lucy, but Juliet has no answer for her daughter. She thinks, It is better not to know.

The taxi driver slams the trunk until at last it catches. His expression is closed. He wants assurance he will be paid, nothing more. Again the girl approaches Earl, arms outstretched. He holds her off with what looks like twenty dollars. The taxi driver shakes his head: it might not be enough. So Earl brings out another bill.

The girl collapses into the back seat, but she is silent only for a moment. As the taxi waits to pull out of the driveway, she seems to catch fire. She rolls her window down and emerges, dazzling with fury, rising as if from the sea, terrible and prophetic and bright. She fixes directly on Juliet, as if she’s known all along that they’ve been watching, mesmerized, consuming the surface of her story, silent accomplices to her misery.

Juliet knows: she stands accused.

And then the cabbie catches a break and squeals out between a silver minivan and a white sedan, and the girl is gone. Earl scuffs back along the sidewalk to his house, not in any particular hurry. The caretaker has gone inside. Presently she emerges with a broom and sweeps the paved area where her chair belongs, as if it has been soiled by the girl’s spilled clothing, a diseased thread here, a scar of fabric there.

Into the silence, Walter says, randomly, “She a mommy.” He does not often speak. He says it again: “She a mommy.”

“Who?” says Juliet, and then, “No. No, they’re not mommies. They’re just ladies. Girls. Women.” She feels this strongly: she wants the sun’s gaze and the pool of birch shade and this forever afternoon just for herself and her children, the solidity of family immunizing them against the forces of chaos and confusion, of mistakes made badly and publicly, of breakdown and uncontrolled display.

“She a mommy, she a mommy, she a mommy.”

“Yes,” Juliet says, to stop him, and in saying it she knows it could be true. Mothers are everywhere. Everyone has one. The caretaker and the girl who left by taxi — their bodies might know everything that Juliet’s knows: the clutch of love, the slippery molecules of joy, the anticipation, the endless promises and ripping guilt.

The thought opens her like an axe.

She is sitting under the patch of young birch trees on one of those very hot days in late summer. Blue plastic Popsicle stems litter the porch steps behind them. Cut grass sticks to her hands. Her children’s warm bodies sprawl nearby. She is waiting. She is waiting for a girl — a stranger — to tear out of an apartment building across the street.

The girl is screaming, she is casting about for help, and no one will help her.

Juliet stands. She does not hesitate. She takes her children by the hand and walks to the street’s edge and waits for a break in the traffic. They cross.

As she approaches the girl, she calls out, Are you okay?

The girl rages. No, I’m not fucking okay.

Can I help you?

No. The girl pauses. Well, cash. Cash.

Juliet has a flattened ten-dollar bill in her pocket. Her children watch silently as she passes it to the girl. Behind them, bags thrown off a porch land like dull explosions.

Let me help.

The caretaker smiles. This is none of your damn business. If you knew what shit she was pulling in here — she’s crazy. She’s certifiable.

You’re the fucking crazy.

I wouldn’t touch those if I were you. She’s sick.

But Juliet bends and gathers a thin T-shirt, a pair of cut-off sweat pants, a neon green windbreaker, and folds them neatly.

Why are you doing this? says the caretaker.

Because, says Juliet, I couldn’t just sit there and watch. She points to the birch trees across the street, and there they are, sitting and watching, the mother, the children, protected by the wall of family, enthralled.

You can’t be there and here.

I know, says Juliet. I think I am in the middle of a decision.

That’s not how it works. Look at us. You can’t choose one way or the other; you drift, we’re all drifters, it all happens invisibly, by accident; even if you think you know where you’re going, you don’t know what’s going to fall into your path, what’s going to trip you up, what you can’t stop no matter how hard you try. You don’t control the weather.

And all along, it’s all in here. In your head.

And in here, says the girl, pressing her heart. In your body.

And in here, says Earl, walking slowly up the sidewalk towards them. His hands are cupped. Juliet can’t see what he’s holding.

They stand on the paved earth and the taxi arrives. The girl says she doesn’t need any more help, thanks.

But where are you going? asks Juliet. And are you going to be okay? How can you go like this into the world, with nothing, with no protection, how can you do this? Aren’t you terrified?

The girl does not answer. She climbs into the back seat and slams the door. But she is silent only for a moment, and then she rolls down her window. She climbs up and out, dazzling with passion, rising as if out of the sea, and she says, Juliet, that is how every last everyone goes out into the world. And no, she cries, I am not afraid!

Pick up all the little pieces that do not fit. There are at least enough for one more story. You have Daniel Ortega’s imitation gold wristwatch slipping sideways, too large for the slender bones of his wrist. You have children at sunset, and a lost island, and the pitch of your mother’s laughter as she returns from an evening out. Laughter has woken you, and comforts you deeply. Your father laughs in return. They are laughing together.

But you can’t find what you are looking for.

What are you missing? Is it your grudge, your urge to confess, your rage, your trouble, your righteousness? Can’t you leave the little pieces to shrink and wither and drift, to be knocked to the floor by a child’s elbow and accidentally vacuumed up?

No, you can’t.

So you pray. You practise. You work. You stretch your body regularly and lie upon the floor hearing your heart pound in rhythm with your lungs. A month is like an hour, and an hour is a month. You live for years until it comes to you: how you have loved sifting the little piles for clues and premonitions.

You don’t want to come to the end.

Tell me: Do you remember what it feels like to be young?

Your birthday has come and gone, and you measure your age on your hands in two outspread suns. The symmetry of numbers enchants. You have memorized the multiplication tables in your new language, and they are forever cast in this form:
ocho por seis, cuarenta y ocho; ocho por siete, cincuenta y seis
.

The natural world is both literal and magical. You make a camera with your fingers, framing every scene you want to keep:
click
. One of the grown-ups has taught you this trick, because real cameras and film are rare. You believe in the technology; you take hundreds of pictures with your hands. On car rides you close your eyes and drift through the album in your mind. Many photos are of horses: thin, bony, stark in deep, dry fields of grass. You are drawn to sunsets and water. You take a picture of the dank and rotting house you and your brother have constructed against a concrete wall: stinking palm branches, swarming with minuscule flies. Here is the front porch wall against which your bare feet have crashed and stopped you, hard, when sliding the slick red tiles in a rainstorm.

Why keep these things? You do not think, the way a grown-up would,
This too shall pass
. You gather not for need or market value but for pleasure, much as you and your brother collect bottle caps and, later, when he is sick and you are not, the shared loot of coins and stamps and baseball cards. You enjoy arranging them in symmetrical piles according to characteristics and rules based on your own interests: by colour, or type, or year, or by an arbitrary and personal hierarchy from favourite to least. Their existence is comforting, and the pleasure of placing them in your own order pulls you towards the ground, sits you deeper inside calm and solidity, and self.

You think none of these thoughts. Without agonizing, you do what feels right.

You cup your hand to catch the wind and catch the wind and catch the wind in the back seat of a cramped car bumping around blind corners on a jungled mountainside green with the rainy season. To your left, a tangle of trees and rocks beyond the sheer drop into valley. To your right, a wall of crumbling boulders. Should a bus loaded with strangers surprise your dad around the next corner, where will he turn?

We’re all going to die!
But you shout it as a joke, as full of mirth as if shouting
I’m alive, I’m alive, I’m alive!

The car, rushing with air and noise, slips into a cloud come down to earth, milky and cool, and the road disappears, and horizon, and form. Through broken floorboards wispy tendrils seep in like words erased before expressed. You are trying to catch the wind in your hands. It is all around you, all over your skin.

A voice says, This is what a cloud looks like from the inside.

You have imagined walking on a cloud, kicking out the window of an airplane and leaping, light as a ballet dancer, onto marshmallow softness. If you were a grown-up you might be disappointed to discover that wet fog is the true nature of a cloud, and not what you’d imagined. But you are young, and you believe in many things at once. The cloud in the sky retains its froth, even while you shiver with delight to find yourself inside a real cloud here on earth, breathing its humid coolness, admiring its shroud, gazing upon a changed and lost world, your cheeks damp.

Do you remember when your parents knew everything?

Your mother is ever so slightly in love with Daniel Ortega. Your mother and father dress up fancy and go to a dinner and dance attended by the Sandinista leadership. Your mother is smoking a cigarette when Daniel Ortega, the president of this country and hero of its revolution, approaches her table. In one smooth movement, she and another woman, also smoking, pass their cigarettes to a friend. The friend sits coolly, delighted beneath his moustache, a non-smoker holding two lit cigarettes between the peace fingers of his right hand, while Daniel Ortega inclines his head, pulls your mother to standing, leans in to kiss the air brushing her cheekbones.

Daniel Ortega’s wristwatch slips from under the green cuff of his uniform and catches the bones of his wrist: it is too large for him. Your mother believes this is proof of his humility. She needs no further evidence.

Why do you?

Escape. You are not getting away from it all, or running away, or leaving it all behind; that is what a grown-up would do. You have entered another dimension, elementally free in thin shorts and T-shirt, the wind lifting your braids and lake spray light on your lips. A fisherman pilots the motorboat that is taking you and your family to an island among many, a place you’ve never been.

You disembark; the boat tilts with weight dispersed. If you fall into sweet green water it is as warm as your own blood. There are sharks in this lake: the only freshwater sharks on the planet, and you would like to see one. The fisherman catches fresh fish for your lunch and guts them, roasts them over fire. Your dad slings a hammock between trees and relaxes, a large man in short swimwear; he drinks rum and Cokes with your mom. Your hands grip rope hanging from a branch and you swing out over the water, drop down, plunging all the way under, drenched as a sea rat.

It does not rain until late afternoon. There are hundreds of tiny islands in this lake. You could live here, with fire and a hammock and a net for fish, or sharks. Everyone imagines it, even your parents.

Your parents are talking about a dream, but you are not. You are talking about something that could actually happen. You are talking about possible worlds, parallel lives, the ones you will live in throughout your life, slipping sideways and through the membrane that separates the noise and substance of your finite life from the sweet, calm inertia of your forever lives, the ones going on beside you, drifting and holy and unchanged despite the passage of time.

You are on the boat; your face is wet. The boat rocks to a lull and you step onto this island and you are here again, warm, barefoot, wiry, at play with your brothers, and your parents are here too, without a care for the day, without grief or rage or blame. This is not an illusion. This is still happening, and you know that it is, because you can find it in your mind as easily as closing your eyes and letting go the rope, the fibres scratching your palms as you hang for an instant between sky and water, as you fall through and under and hold your breath, your knees folding to meet your belly, your hands spread in front of your face and your eyes wide open.

Where are you right now, if not here, too?

The stones beneath your feet are cool, wide, washed by the warm salt water of the Pacific Ocean. Your bare soles are tough and your toes grip the slippery rock effortlessly. All around you breathes the humid falling of night. Earlier, following the afternoon rains, you ran the solemn wild shoreline believing you could catch the rainbow left behind, and now, a phosphorescent thunderous sky of layered orange and black draws in as you watch, exhilarated, belly full of fresh fish and fried rice eaten at a thatch-roofed shack way back there. Flies landing on the lip of your glass pop bottle; blowing them away.

Your brothers stand beside you. You pause in a ragged row and look at the same sky.

Click
.

Three children silhouetted against a pure palette, vivid shadows.

The waves beat a steady wash against the rocks, and out there someone is crawling the water — your dad, though he is not a strong swimmer. Behind you, when you turn to shore, a grown-up’s heavy black camera swings around his neck; whose, you cannot remember. There are so many of them, and you feel such intimacy, such knowing, it seems you should recall with absolute clarity who stands where and does what; but the details are mutable. Anything you put down on the page will be wrong.

You are here.

You spring out of the camera’s frame, splash into the waves, crouch, slip your shoulders and head backward and down until your face goes under and comes up, rushing with salt water, tilted to the sky. The tides carry danger. You don’t know what
undertow
means but feel it viscerally, in the body, a quiet power beneath waiting to grab you and pull you under, where no one will hear when you open your mouth.

Your hair is wet rope and your bathing suit clings to your stomach, and it is almost time, almost, to leave, but no one wants to go.

So you’ll stay.

You’ll pick this up and keep it, as the photograph is kept, printed and framed and packaged and mailed to a new address in another country, where it hangs on the wall by the stairs, a little askew no matter who tries to straighten it. It is a beautiful photograph. Guests remark upon it.

You think, I don’t know where that picture ended up.

You look to the pile on your desk, but while you were typing it has scattered. The windows are open, and a breeze pulls out like tide receding from shore. You see Daniel Ortega’s wristwatch in the teeth of a squirrel scrambling across the street on a wire. Your mother’s laugh has been caught by a girl passing on the sidewalk below, a cellphone pressed to her ear.

The tide pulls.

You cover the keyboard and stand. You climb onto the window ledge — it isn’t high. Without pause or hesitation, without listening for the cries of your children, you spring onto a shifting cloud and, toes pointed, leap on strong legs to another and another and another, higher and higher, until this house is a red and black speck and the trees are smudges of smoke and the sky is an ocean, and you swim like forever.