The Juliet Stories (4 page)

Juliet pours clean water from the container in the fridge, boiled by her mother and set there to cool.

She carries the cup to Keith. “Mom’s sick too,” she says.

She picks at the pock on her wrist and knows, sinkingly,
It’s just a mosquito bite
.

The maid clucks her tongue to discover Juliet alone, crouched at the table with her book.

Juliet looks at the maid but doesn’t see, just as she looks at the page but cannot process the words; inside her skull is a muddle. She tracks a thought towards possibility but disaster swoops, tricks her, traps her, sends her scurrying behind a rock where she huddles, waiting to be devoured. The boys in the book have survived wolves and polar bears, but Juliet, ramrod straight with paralysis, sits in a sheltered room, in a large city populated by people who seem to be friendly, with a cafeteria one floor below, and contemplates dying of starvation.

Then it comes again: low, nonsensical words rising in a crescendo behind the beaded curtain.

Panic weaves invisible threads, ties Juliet to her chair.

The maid, muttering like an untuned radio, pauses to listen, turns, eyes Juliet.

Bianca
. Juliet mouths the maid’s name.

“
¿Tu madre?
” Bianca demands. Feet slap tiles, beads chatter like fevered teeth. Juliet hears Bianca shouting to her mother — her volume, her certainty and impatience never falter — and then,
swish-swish
, she’s back.

Snap-snap
, her fingers say to Juliet, who rabbits herself hunched and blinking.

“Come here!” Bianca rubs together the fingers of one hand to indicate money. “
Dinero, dinero
,” she points, and Juliet, confused, obedient, allows herself to be propelled to the cupboard beside the sink, to open the peeling door, to discover, in a plastic glass, a rolled handful of American dollar bills.

Bianca claps: “Now. Quickly. Hurry.”

Juliet upends the glass and holds in her palm the slick, greasy-feeling fortune.

Bianca calls to Gloria: “We’ll be back.” Or: “Don’t worry.” Or: “You’ll never see your daughter ever again.”

There is no time for
Help!
as the apartment door slams behind them.

Bianca clamps Juliet’s wrist, drags her through the seminary’s gates; no one questions this. They scurry the busy, dusty street, and already Juliet, squinting under the steadfast sun, is lost. They veer into a dim and crumbling
tienda
. The woman behind the store counter grins as Bianca produces Juliet with a flourish. The women’s hands flag the air expressively, they are emphatic, their lips pucker and purse:
¡Ahh, sí, sí, sí, que no, aye que lástima!

Juliet could cry.

From darkness behind the counter, the woman produces a chicken. Plucked and pimpled, it is mercifully headless, but Juliet recoils. Bianca taps the hand in which the dollars are clasped, unfolds and counts bills, licking her thumb: mostly ones and fives. A bag of rice, half-filled, is thrown onto the counter, a jug of dark cooking oil, salt, sugar, eggs. The women argue back and forth, but in the end Bianca insists on only the chicken. She pays and returns the change to Juliet, who doesn’t trust her, and who cannot refuse the still body, placed into her arms like a brand-new baby wrapped in plastic, smelling of something disturbing and recognizable, almost human: faint rot, flesh.

Everything is a peripheral blur as Juliet chases Bianca’s smudged heels in pitted flip-flops along the rutted road, through a break in a knocked-down wall, into a tiny courtyard where four small children, partially clothed, play in dust beneath a laden clothesline. Juliet feels her lungs expanding, contracting. The building is four storeys tall, its face entirely ripped off, each floor and its contents — flapping sheets and cooking fires — visible from below.

Emmanuel’s diapers swing on the line overhead. Beside the diapers hang her mother’s red blouse and a pair of shorts Juliet recognizes as belonging to herself, though all are so removed, flapping in this location, that she feels no attachment.

A thought bursts, collapses: She imagines herself pinned to the clothesline.

Bianca unbuttons her dress and grabs the smallest child, who feeds and squirms, craning his neck to examine this pale stranger. Juliet is obvious, and reduced. She hides behind herself because she is both naked and disguised in broad daylight; she is only what she appears to be, all surface.

Bianca is shouting names: her children’s, which she wants Juliet to repeat. An old woman materializes with displeasure from the building’s bowels, like a dried-apple doll brought to life. For no apparent reason she slaps one of the children, and the little boy stops his howl with his thumb. For this he is slapped again.

“
Mi madre
,” says Bianca. The woman offers Juliet a triangular pastry. “
Pico, pico
,” she repeats. Juliet will cry now. She will cry.

“Psst . . .” With her free hand Bianca snatches a frayed cloth off the line and the old woman wraps several pastries, then balances the package atop Juliet’s chicken. Juliet’s chin holds everything in place, and she is helpless as the old woman draws money from her fingers.

Bianca pulls the baby off her breast, still sucking. He screams, but not for long; maybe he expects a smack. He cannot crawl, but sits on his bottom and tugs his penis.

Pico
. It is a sweet glazed bread, filled with soft cheese. Nothing could taste finer, no dough could be more tender, melting on Juliet’s tongue. Over the blue gas flame, a pot of salted water and one whole chicken boils and bubbles and fills the sweltering rooms with the smell of a far-off home — in another country, where this is winter’s comfort food. Bianca is satisfied, and gone. She is gone.

Gloria swallows four tablespoons of hot soup; she does not ask where it has come from, and Juliet does not think to tell. Keith drinks two bowls. Juliet tears both drumsticks off the carcass, with some effort and spilled broth and flaring flame. The sigh of gas hissing and alight accompanies their sleep. Around midnight the tank runs empty; for the first night in a while, the apartment quiets.

By morning, the
pico
has staled. Emmanuel will not be content to lie beside his mother for even one minute more, and Juliet trails behind as senseless instinct toddles him towards electrical outlets and dangling cords and open windows and exposed fan blades.

Bianca doesn’t come. The thought occurs to Juliet while she wearily gnaws a cold chicken bone, but Emmanuel, neglected, tumbles down the steps into the main room, and Juliet doesn’t think of it again.

He bounces upright and stares at her, chin smeared in blood.

“Mom!!!” yells Juliet, clutching him, trying. Wet washcloth. There is no ice. Cold water.

“Goddammit,” cries Gloria. Spots of blood dribble to the floor, down Emmanuel’s bare chest, onto Gloria’s sheets and her greying T-shirt and Juliet’s shoulder. “Nobody else is allowed to say that.”

“Then why are you?”

It’s just a split lip, but Juliet is to blame and she hates being to blame.

“Stop feeling sorry for yourself,” says Gloria, prone. She is weak, but that does not stop her from being withering.

“I miss Laci.” Juliet feels her lips tremble. It is the closest she can come to saying: I want to go home. Laci, her best friend in Indiana, loved playing with Emmanuel, cradling and swaddling him like a living doll, and Emmanuel adored her right back.

But his feelings towards Juliet are ambivalent. When she tries to entertain him in their sweltering rooms, he fights and fusses. He snaps her crayons in half and rips up drawings for the fun of it, and he can’t drink anything out of a cup without spilling.

There goes the rest of the day.

It is dusk when Bram arrives. He appears out of the half-light: they’d forgotten him. He is jaunty from his journey, slap-happy, brimming with jokes and camaraderie and dust blown through open windows, sights unimaginable. He walks into this forlorn place a foreigner in a distant land, and just as unwelcome.

“Fix this mess!” croaks Gloria from the bedroom, and Juliet hates her. Hasn’t she, Juliet, tried? Hasn’t she done her best? And all her mother sees is a mess. Ambushed, Juliet becomes a furious projectile: she runs roaring around the table, bashes a chair and knocks it down, sprints past her father and out of the apartment, leaving behind an echo of confusion.

“Juliet?”

She pants in the wide-open courtyard. In crashing darkness she searches for the fort she and Keith have built out of fallen palm leaves against the chain-link fence. In luminous darkness she destroys it, and feels much better. Peaceful. Stars prick the night sky. The city’s lights pale by comparison, yellowed, stinking of diesel fuel.

“Juliet?”

She squats under a bare tree and watches him standing in the seminary hallway staring out. Her father is nothing but shadow, cut from a piece of purple construction paper. He can’t see her.

“I know you’re out here,” he says. “Juliet, let’s not give your mom more to worry about.”

Silence.

“Come out, come out, wherever you are.”

Juliet slinks beneath shadows until she’s close enough to yell, “Boo!”

Bram doesn’t twitch. Juliet wants something on his face that he won’t show her: fear, apology, relief, anger?

“I know it’s been tough.” He squeezes her shoulder. They climb the stairs to the apartment. “But I’m home now.” They open the apartment door to discover — Emmanuel peeing in the corner of the main room, Keith propped in a chair, idly observing.

“This is not okay,” says Bram. He does not raise his voice. He lowers and softens it, making of it a gloved fist of disappointment. “I left you in charge, Keith. I expect better.”

Keith freezes, Emmanuel dribbles, and from the bedroom Gloria yells, “Leave them alone, coming in here like a big bully . . .”

Calmly, Bram spanks Emmanuel, one whack on bare speckled bottom, as if he hasn’t even noticed the fat lip or the pox. He would do the same to Keith, but there isn’t time: Gloria propels herself through shrieking beads towards Bram’s throat.

“If you ever ever ever —” she cries, but Bram holds Emmanuel out to her.

“Stop yourself, Gloria,” he says.

Juliet doesn’t know if her mother would actually hit her father. She has seen Gloria pitch at him half a loaf of unsliced homemade bread, across the dinner table, an act not meant to be funny that instantly became a family joke; but Juliet cannot make this into a joke. It won’t fit. Like Keith, Juliet is nothing but eyes, watching her mother yank Emmanuel from her father’s grasp, watching her squeeze Emmanuel fiercely until he squeals in protest. He’s already forgotten the spank; bewildered, he beats Gloria’s shoulder, kicks her soft belly.

Holding him, she passes through the beads, a mama bear entering unnavigable black forest. The beads sway and whisper, sway and swing, and, finally, hang silent too.

“Your mother —” begins Bram, but he takes one step backwards and splashes into the puddle of urine, and this is the moment that recasts the tumbling moments that came before, this is their rescue and delivery. Bram pretends to skid, threatens to slip and fall, arms comically spinning, until Juliet and Keith are goaded to laughter, and even Gloria drags herself out for a look and a snort.

“All better?” says Bram.

“You always think so.” Gloria crawls back to bed.

“It always is.”

Juliet is down to the last book in the pile from the Canadian boys — about a hunting dog — and she has not forgotten the library.

“Maybe today —” she says as her mother collapses into a chair on the other side of the table, but the door bangs open, and Juliet is first to see Bianca. The blouse hangs loose on her narrow shoulders, but red is the colour Bianca is meant to be wearing, red like painted lips, like candy; she radiates vigour and health.

Gloria, too weak for coffee after a cold morning shower, turns and gasps. “My blouse,” she says in English.

Bianca, bustling, chatting, filling the sink with water, cannot understand, and has no warning.

“My blouse, my blouse.” Scarred with dried pocks, thin and pale, Gloria is a record player skipping, her voice rising with her body. Her fury flowers. It blooms, explodes. Petals scatter.

Bianca pauses, cocks her head to listen.

“Mine.” Gloria points. Fury cannot calm itself to be translated. “That’s mine. You stole it. Thief!”

“Mom!” Juliet runs around the table.

“And our diapers,” says Gloria. “Where are my baby’s diapers?”

“Mom.” Juliet tugs her mother’s arm. Keith stares at his plate and Emmanuel chuckles, but Bianca only dries her hands on her skirt, puzzled.

“Get out! You’re not welcome here. Out!”

“Please?” whispers Juliet.

“She’s taken advantage of us, Juliet. You don’t understand. You stay out of it.”

In this blouse Bianca is fearless, if ever she were anything but. She dries her hands again, lifts the bucket and the mop, though she does not shut the door behind her. Juliet wishes to run after her and explain, but there is nothing to be untangled by explanation, nor are Juliet’s silent pleas addressed to Bianca. Bianca is a thief, this is true. The diapers are gone, this is true. But Bianca’s baby will get to wear them; but you should see her house, Mom; but she made you soup. You got better.

Gloria grips the back of a chair, the eloquently carved wood under her fingers dark with vines. She is thinking, hard. She goes to the cupboard and swings the door.

“The dollars,” she says.

Juliet opens her mouth, closes it.

“She stole the dollars too.”

Juliet studies the unmopped tiles, identifies a print that matches her own foot. She is trying to remember what happened to the leftover bills. Were there any? Stealthily she feels in the pockets of her shorts, the same pair she’s worn for days, and removes her hand as if it’s touched fire.

She licks her lips.

“It wasn’t much,” says Gloria. Petals sink to earth. Stillness settles in the breezeless room. “It wasn’t much, but I should have known better. I’ll speak to the director.”