Is it true? he asked.
Yes, I said. We have studied our killers very hard, since the beginning. We believe we are destined, some remnant of us, to outlive them.
Do you know that the Mundo have always sent spies out to live among the conquerors? That this was always our highest form of sacrifice? The Mundo have always needed someone to sit among the killers and to come back and tell us how little mercy to expect. Your culture is very tricky, though, Senor. Sometimes our people have not come back. Sometimes they have become who they watched. With the widespread use of television, we faced a crisis of major proportion.
How did you deal with it? Senor Robinson asked.
The Mundo way with television, I said, is to put it in a room by itself, preferably a closet, and to choose one person a week or month to go and watch it. Then to report back. We have noticed, I said, that some of these spies, too, never return.
Senor Robinson laughed.
Manuelito chuckled. Anyone with the proper spirit can be a Mundo. Gathering together for a moment before they find and destroy us is the hard part.
But how do you know all this? Senor Robinson asked.
Haven't you noticed? I said. After you die, you know everything.
Ashes
Just like a proper Mundo wife, I found myself humming the initiation song, the same one he had been singing, as Manuelito's body was placed on a stretcher and carried away. I saw the police go through his pockets, read his bracelet--which specified the kind of medical attention he required if found collapsed in a heap--and knew they would contact Maria. The air seemed to shimmer before my eyes as I turned toward home. I felt the absence of my parents keenly as I squeezed through my front door. Sighing, I made myself an eye-watering martini and climbed into bed.
Looking at Susannah across the room from me, it is easy to see why she was always everybody's pet. There is a smallness about her, even though she is tall. She is very neat, and sleek. Even while sitting alone in a big chair she turns her body this way and that, as if a giant hand is stroking it.
How is the latest affair? I ask her.
Instructive, she says, and grins.
What is it this time? Man, woman, or succulent plant?
She grins wider.
And Daddy thought I was the tramp, I said.
Are you still angry with me? she bluntly asks, which she's never done before. It stops me in my tracks. The ones I am making toward a bucket of chicken in the kitchen.
Why should I be angry with you? I ask.
Oh, June, she says. Come on.
That you were loved and I was not?
But you were loved. Mama and Daddy loved you.
Mama loved me.
Daddy loved you, too.
He did not trust me. How can love exist without trust?
Do you think God trusts us?
Let's leave that troublemaker out of it.
You just never let Daddy forget what he did to you, said Susannah. I know he apologized.
I wanted reparation, I said, not apology.
Reparation! What are you talking about?
I wanted to be made whole again, goddammit! He'd taken the moment in my life when I was most secure in its meaning. The moment my life opened, not just to my family and friends, but to me myself. The moment when I knew my life was given to me for me to own. He took that moment and he broke it into a million bits. He made it dirty and evil.
Sex scared him, said Susannah.
Right, I said, a man who was fucking all the time, and when he wasn't fucking, thinking about fucking.
He was a hypocrite, said Susannah. It troubled him that he was.
Not enough, I said.
He tried to make it up to you. When he and Mama finally got some recognition for their work and some money from their books, they sent both of us to good schools. We never wanted for anything.
I wanted for love, I said. For trust. For a father who wouldn't go ballistic just because I was having orgasms with a cute Mundo boy.
He thought you might get pregnant, said Susannah.
If he'd learned anything important about the Mundo, he'd have known that wasn't going to happen. And even if it had, would that have been the end of the world? He was an anthropologist pretending to be a minister. In neither of those professions is it advised to batter the people you want to engage. It is like the conquistadors who came to the new world and boasted that they introduced the cross with the sword. Well, the cross, Christianity, cannot be introduced with the sword. Just as love cannot be encouraged by the fist.
Oh, June, she said. How can you hold on to this stuff?
Do you think I enjoy holding on to it? The man wrecked my life, I said.
Well, you tried to wreck mine, she said, hotly.
What do you mean? I asked.
Don't try to be innocent, said Susannah, looking more flushed than I'd ever seen her. You know what I mean.
I did know what she meant.
I loved Daddy, she said. I always loved Daddy. I also loved you. But suddenly, because of that wretched day in Mexico, I had to choose between you.
Nobody forced you, I said.
You didn't force me, said Susannah, you just never let me forget.
It was something awful that happened to your sister; why should you want to forget?
But he was my father, she said, with vehemence. I loved him. You were the one who'd disobeyed him. Which is what you took pleasure in doing all your life. I never disobeyed him. We got along fine.
And because of my sluttish behavior, you lost him, I sneered. Is that the shit you're trying to tell me?
You never let me forget I was sitting in the lap of a monster, said Susannah.
Somebody had to remind you, I said. Otherwise, I added, you'd have just grinned and Tommed your life away.
She rolled her eyes at this. What business was it of yours? she said. He was never a monster to me! Because of you, I lost my father. One half of the love that was due me in this world. She leaned forward in her chair and wiped her eyes. And he was so pitiful, trying to win me back, trying to rekindle my trust. But you were always there to step between us, to say, at the most tender of moments between us, "No, I do not care for any."
Of his bullshit? No, I didn't care for any, I said.
But he wasn't offering it to you, not after a long while, anyway, but to me. You made it impossible for me to accept that my father loved me, that he accepted and trusted me.
If you'd fucked around like I did you would have seen how little he cared about your love and trust, I said.
Well, said Susannah, believe it or not, I did have a love life that he knew about. While we lived in Sag Harbor and I was in high school. He never once scolded me. He never once said I was wrong. He took me aside and talked to me about birth control, just as any caring father would.
I had not known this. It hurt like hell.
But even this didn't ease the tension around sex enough for me to loosen up again with him, the way I'd been before that horrible moment in Mexico.
He was a brute, a hypocrite, a liar. And Mama was his moll, I said.
How can you say that? said Susannah.
She should have left him after what he did to me.
But June, she said, she loved him. We were a family. Where in the world would she have gone with the broken heart leaving him would have given her?
What about my broken heart?
As I said this, I relived the moments of being beaten by my father in the small white room in Mexico. It had been very warm, sultry. A limb of a tree arched across the open window, a bird had flown lazily across the sky. The silver disks on Manuelito's belt made dents in my skin. There was blood. I was thinking only of not crying. And of how much I hated my father for making me forsake, too soon, the recent memory of love.
I began to scream.
June, Magdalena, I heard my sister calling me. I had plunged headlong into the tunnel of my own throat. All that I was, was scream. I screamed and screamed
and screamed. There was a hammering at the door. There were sirens. There were strange people in the room. I screamed. I threw my bulk about the living room, breaking everything with which I came in contact. I felt my sister's fluttering throat in my hands, felt her sleek head banging against the wall, breaking the frame of a photograph that hung behind her, a photograph of the two of us, our parents' arms about us, tender and secure. Her pretty face the color of ashes, she raised her arm to defend her face from my teeth and I bit it to the bone. There was a stinging sensation in my upper shoulder. I let go of Susannah's throat and dropped like a stone. Magdalena, June, MacDoc, Mad Dog had come home.
Mad Dog Behavior
When I woke up, groggy, in the hospital, I did not care about anything. I thought about my students. What sense did it make that I taught them for three or four years of their lives and they still did not know me? That I did not know them? That I might meet their parents only once or twice in my life? Perhaps at their phony-feeling graduation. How stupid this seemed to me. I helped them on their mad rush into adulthood and into a world that was steadily turning to shit. Had always been shit. Money was the god of the culture into which they were born, and would live to hustle and die; I wanted no part of it.
I thought about my mother. When she was dying I used to visit and read to her. She would doze, and then I would stop reading and stare at her face. I was trying to remember how it felt to love her. For I ceased loving her when she abandoned me. There were moments of tenderness between us, moments of affection. But I would not have taken a bullet for her, as I would have done before she fucked herself back under my daddy's thumb. The cancer ravaged her, made her lose the luscious body she'd worn like a flag. A flag that said: Nation of Woman Representative. Kneel, Male. And yet, even as she lay dying, no body at all left to speak of, there sat my father, his hands cupping her flat breasts, his hands cupping her heels, his hands cupping her bony knees. His hands cupping her ass. It infuriated me.
How had I lost out? Was it, as Susannah had once said to me, that I had hardened my heart so successfully it no longer functioned, no matter how I might have wanted it to? And is this what happened when someone broke your heart and you insisted on leaving it that way, just to punish them?
The doctor came into the room while I was thinking of Susannah.
How are you feeling, Ms. Robinson? he asked, glancing at my chart.
He looked like a child playing doctor.
You should at least draw on a mustache, I said.
What? he asked.
You look so young, I said.
I'm thirty, he said. Old enough to know what to do.
Be serious, I said.
He looked at me quizzically.
Nobody's ever old enough to know what to do.
He laughed.
How's my sister? I asked.
Well, you didn't quite bite her arm off, he said. But you reached the bone. I've never seen anything like it, he said.
Mad Dog behavior, I said.
The other Ms. Robinson, your sister, explained that you were under stress, that you'd just lost a loved one.
Manuelito. I had not been thinking of him. Now I thought about the way his back glistened in the water when we played in the water of our mountains' shallow streams. The elegant neatness of his waist. His long, mostly straight, slightly wavy hair. His honest eyes. Sweet nose. White teeth. This fucking country had blown all of that up, I thought. Then stuck it back together with a couple of cheap medals and kicked it out into the street. Motherfuckers.
I began to wail.
The nurse will be bringing your medication, said the doctor, heading rapidly for the door. He was obviously one of those Western medical wonders who could only deal with the bit of patient flesh he was poking at and couldn't function if the whole thing started to cry.
Along with the nurse came Susannah, her face horribly bruised, her arm in a sling.
How you doin'? she asked.
Did I give you that black eye? I asked.
Yes, she said. And you bit my arm right through to the bone.
I didn't mean to do it, I said.
I didn't think you did. Well, you didn't strangle me to death. I'm thankful.
Remember how they used to write stories about black people who suddenly went nuts and killed somebody, how they always described it as "going berserk"? Well, we have now witnessed firsthand how that could happen.
I'd never heard anyone scream like you did, said Susannah. It was a scream from hell.
It felt like that, I said. Like it had been building up in me for a thousand years. I couldn't stand it that you had been loved and I had not.
Manuelito loved you, said my sister, sighing.
That is why I was screaming, really, I said. I knew what being loved felt like, and then because of some religious bullshit I didn't even subscribe to, enforced by my own father, who didn't really believe it either, I didn't have it in my life anymore.
We were leaving the mountains, said Susannah; you would have lost Manuelito anyway.
Little sister, I said, don't make me bite your other arm.
Right, she said. That's stupid.
You know what I think? I asked.
What? she said.
I think that some things you don't heal from. Not in this lifetime, anyway.
We could try to help each other heal, said Susannah. We could heal each other.
How would we do that? I asked. I'm set in my ways already. Married to my habits. The biggest habit I have is despising the man who gave me life.
That's easy, said Susannah. Try to imagine the father I love, why I love him. Why Mama loved him. Why you loved him before he humiliated you. Don't pin him to that one moment. He was a human being, like you and me. You just strangled me and took a plug out of my arm, but now you're lying there looking like you're sorry. Are you?
I thought about it.
Come on, said Susannah, don't be such a witch. Aren't you sorry?
Yes, I said.
I rest my case.
It's not the same, I said.
Of course it is, she said.
I was a child.
Maggie, please, just forgive the son of a bitch.
This made me laugh.
Memories Are So Heavy
Ms. Robinson, said my youthful doctor, the important thing is that you must lose weight.
But my memories are so heavy, Doctor, I said.
It isn't impossible, said my sister, sitting at the foot of my bed. I am coming home with you. We'll start your new life together.
Susannah, I said, it is your goodness that nauseates me.
She smiled.
Too bad, Sis. She turned to the doctor. How much weight should she lose?
A couple of hundred pounds would make her feel a lot better, he said. Her furniture would be a lot happier too.
Very amusing, I said. What neither of you realizes, I continued, is that fatness serves a purpose. When I am fat I feel powerful, as if I could not possibly need anything more.
Yes, said Susannah, and you like to butt people out of your way on the street.
What would I have to eat to lose two hundred pounds? I mused.
Oh, lots of things, said the skinny young doctor. My wife cooks stuff for us that has almost no fat.
What do you cook for her? I asked.
I don't cook, he said.
Why's she stuck with you?
Don't pay her any mind, Doctor, said Susannah, smiling her toothpaste-ad smile, showing her perfect little teeth. She was born to bitch.
And bitch I did, the whole week she stayed with me, talking about carrots and colonics. As soon as she left I threw out the juicer she'd bought and hauled my first big marbled steak out of the freezer, mashed my first mound of buttery potatoes. Had my first alcoholic drink. It was as if my memories were lodged in my cells, and needed to be fed. If I lost weight perhaps my memories of Manuelito and my anger at my father would fade away. I felt so abandoned already, I did not wa
nt them to go.
Bad Women Aren't
the Only Women
My sister sleeps around, I said to her lover, Pauline.
She looked surprised.
She always has, I said, though when we were growing up I never would have suspected she even liked sex. But she does.
Pauline shrugged. Bad women aren't the only women who enjoy sex. Good women have been known to get down. But your sister is completely loyal to whoever she's in love with. As monogamous as a priest.
Being married to the church would suit her just about as well as it appears to suit those imposters, I said.
I'm telling you, priests play around more than your sister does.
My father considered me a whore, I said. But I have had only one man my whole life. I never cheated on him.
I wouldn't say that, said Pauline.
What do you mean?
I'd say you cheated, with food.
I turned my face away.
Your sister falls in love. Period. I think it is with courage, with guts, which she fears she lacks, that she falls in love. It could be with anyone. She does not appear to look first at the genital area. Loving comes before that, not after. She is faithful to the person she's with. Utterly. If she were not, I would not be with her.
How do you know? That she is faithful? I asked.
Pauline chuckled. I have faith, she said.
Our father loved her, I said; he never loved me.
He must have been very confused, she said.
Her hair was short, spiky, and silver. Her eyes candid and dark.
Her slender, curvaceous body, in black jeans and a crimson shirt, ageless and attractive. I could see why my sister was in love with her.
She was a woman who would not let you evade the issue. Nor would she evade it herself.
I felt a familiar flash of envy for Susannah. Such a Goody Two-shoes all her life; to end up with this spunky creature!
My own father was confused, Pauline said with a sigh. Almost with languor. My father was very tired and confused. He had to pretend he wanted all ten of the children who kept him chained to a table in a meatpacking plant.
Why did he and your mother have so many? I asked.
They thought it was the Christian thing to do, she said. They thought if they did anything to stop the births, God would judge them harshly. Though how much more harshly he could judge them than to make them live with ten children in a three-bedroom apartment, I can't imagine.