Why ever do we do things? Half the time, because we’re mad, angry mad, like I was then. All I remember was feeling the flush spread up from my neck and being glad I’m so dark—darker-skinned than Elena, though she’s the one who’s Mexican—that nobody could tell for sure I was blushing, though I tend to blush all the time. Elena thought she was so goddamned grown up compared to me. I was hot and a little nauseated that day, the way you are when you drink cold coffee and then belch, and I was tired to think I still had so much French to do, and tired of my mama treating me like a ghost if I didn’t get her underwear folded colors separate from whites the way she wanted. I was sick of the stink of garlic and chilies on my hands, which would take two days to come out, and of the things wrong with me that ruined how pretty my hair was and how clear my skin was, and of my chest like a closet door with two buttons on it and of my nose, which was so flat and broad across you could balance a pencil on it. I was sick of feeling like a dumb little kid.
I thought, Elena, I’ll show you.
“You give me his address,” I told Connie. Elena just stared at me as if she could see my bones. “Come on. I mean it.”
And I was stuck surer than a twice-doubled dare.
I went to Oberly’s and spent half an hour looking at the stationery. Most of it was reeky. Puppies and flowers and rainbows and stars. Real juvenile. It looked like what a third grader would use to write to her grandma. Then, in the natural foods section, I found some stationery made of paper recycled from cut-up old cotton clothes. I knew right then it was the perfect thing; it looked just like the colors of sunset and cost six dollars. But I bought two boxes, and I never wrote one single letter to Dillon except on that paper. It was one of the things that became a tradition with us.
But I didn’t know it would happen that way then. I just thought the store might run out, so I should stock up. It’s funny how you find yourself preparing for things you don’t even know will come.
To tell you the truth, I wasn’t sure I’d write a letter at all. If I hadn’t known Elena would mock me forever about it, I’d just have given up the whole thing right there.
Still, I put it off and put it off for days. It wasn’t just that I was busy. I was always busy, but you’re never too busy to do something unless you don’t really want to. Until Elena asked me twice if I’d done it, I pretended it had just slipped my mind. In fact, I was sort of scared. What was I supposed to say, anyway, to a person like that? Was he violent? Was he pitiful? He couldn’t be too smart. I knew I should feel sorry for him. But it gave me the creeps even to think of hands that pulled a trigger on a gun holding paper I’d held in my hands. Still, he was sealed up in Solamente, sealed up tighter than a coin roll. So what I really felt was the kind of fear you have waiting for the roller coaster at the Cinco de Mayo fair and already holding your ticket; you want to turn back, but you know nothing bad can actually touch you.
Even once I was going to do it, I had to plan it out. I couldn’t go writing a letter at work. And I could just see my math teacher, Mr. Hogan, or Mrs. Murray or somebody else grabbing hold of it if I tried to write it in school, or Elena waving it around at the lunch table. I didn’t want my stupid brother Cam seeing me, not that he’d notice anything in front of his face that wasn’t edible or sung by LeAnn Rimes. The first time I decided to actually write Dillon, Mama was at work and I had chores. So I talked Elena into coming over and doing my midweek laundry. In exchange, I would coach her to an easy A on the history take-home test.
It didn’t require much talking into, to tell you the truth. I couldn’t ever understand it, but Elena always wanted a chance to come to my house. It must have been like a field trip for her. She thought everything there was interesting. It sure wasn’t like her house, and not only because it was grungy and small. What was really different was that Cam and me pretty much lived alone; and since living with him was like living with a stuffed dummy, I basically lived alone. Mrs. G. was always running around, picking up things for Elena and reminding her of stuff. Elena couldn’t believe that my mama never had to remind me of anything. She couldn’t believe I didn’t throw a big party every weekend, when my mother worked double shift. As far as Elena was concerned, I was setting a bad example for all the teenage kids of the world. “You’re too good, girlie-girl,” she would tell me when I couldn’t go shopping or get fake nails or whatever because I had stuff to do. “You’re just too obedient. You got to scare your parents once in a while. You should run away. I did that one time, because they wouldn’t let me have a TV in my room. I stayed at my cousin’s eight hours. My mom was crying and making a novena when I came home.”
“Did you get the TV?”
“No. But it was fun. It taught her a lesson.”
That night, Elena was putting the whites in the washer, and I was set up with my new stationery at the kitchen table, when Cam came slumping through the door. He had his blue jeans down around his bottom, and his shirt was longer than my whole body, and his hair, still so blond from summer it looked almost silver, was laced with leather in an Indian braid. He barely looked at me. But then Elena came banging back into the kitchen from the dusty shed where we kept the washer and dryer, yelling she was dying of thirst. She was flushed and sweating, all those wispy black curls clinging loose around her face and forehead. So far as I knew, Cam had only spoken to Elena once in all the times she ever came to our house—and that time, he just asked if Grace was her sister. But this time, he stopped on a dime and put down the orange juice container he was drinking from when she came in; and he looked at her and she looked back, and I saw that she was going to stare him down. She reached up and made her fingers into combs and drew both her hands through all that tangled wet hair and shook it up and back, all without taking her eyes off his. Old Cam finally sort of fell across the room and opened the refrigerator door and started looking inside as if a movie was on in there. Then he slammed the door and took these two giant steps to get into his room as fast as he could. The whole time, there was a coiled-up watching in Elena, like she was the one in charge, as if Cam was trying out for a team or something and she was the coach. She never got nervous, that girl. She still never does.
“What happened to him? He’s a pretty boy now,” Elena whispered when Cam was finally out of earshot.
“Pretty worthless,” I answered. “The way he looks is the best thing about him. I think he’s got him some kind of a genetic defect that he can’t pick up his own underwear off the floor and even put it out there so I can wash it. Which I don’t even know why I’ve got to wash it.”
“You the girl,” Elena said, grinning, carefully extending her shiny legs and laying one on top of the other and then admiring them like they were sculptures. She knew that she could usually get me going by saying something like that—that it drove me nuts how even in school the boys had it so much easier, how teachers would be giving them little hints all the time and looking at the girls like, What did you want, anyhow? But this time I didn’t want to get into it with her. Why were we talking about Cam? What was I going to say when I wrote to Dillon LeGrande, 8477298372, Texas State Department of Corrections, Solamente River, Texas? Did I just talk to him the same as other people and ignore what he was really doing? Pretend he was away at school or something?
When she finally gave up on getting me talking, Elena pulled out her books, bitching about European history. “And I thought all this time they were saying, ‘Hi, Hitler.’ At least that makes sense.”
“What Heil really means is ‘hail.’ Like, ‘You’re great.’ ”
“You mean like, ‘Go, Hitler’?”
I sighed and just stared past her. My hair smelled like the laundry soap on my hands. I asked her then, “Did you know that the prisoners in concentration camps had numbers tattooed on their arms, and prisoners in our own country have numbers, too, that are used the same as their names?”
“Tattooed?”
“God, I don’t think so. When I got this here”—I pushed over the scrap on which Connie had writ
ten Dillon’s address—“I thought it was his phone number. But it’s his, like, serial number.”
“You mean that boy in jail? That LeGrande? You’re not really going to write to him, Arley. I was just fooling. You don’t want to get involved with no boy like that. All those LeGrande boys are bad to the bone, except the little one, Philippe, and that’s only because he’s too little to be bad.”
“I’m writing a letter is all, and you were the one dared me.” What did she think? That next thing I was going to start riding the bus two hours to bring him chocolate-chip cookies? In between doing this house and my job and my homework?
“I don’t even see why Connie wants that Kevin, you know? Connie might have a big butt, but she ain’t so bad she has to go to prison to find a boy.”
“I think Connie’s beautiful.”
“Her butt looks like two pigs fighting in a bag. I say, ‘Constanza, you can see every spoon of Choco-Mocho you ever ate.’ She ought to learn liposuction along with the corrective makeup. Get herself a home unit she can plug in the wall.”
It was Elena reminding me of Connie, and her cosmetics course at the technical college, that made me decide that I was going to lie to Dillon. I realized right then that one big thing I’d been worrying about all along was that no man of twenty-five, or whatever, was going to want to write to a little kid in ninth grade. So I would tell him I was in college. It would give me something to write about. And since I was never going to see him, anyhow, it didn’t matter at all. Elena kept whining, “Come on, Arley, honey-girl. Tell me all about the Beer Hall Putsch. Like I have to know stuff like this in my life. I swear to God if Miz Hunter says one more time, ‘You got to be fluent in your culture . . .’ What culture? I live in Texas! Did you see she’s sticking her keys in the bun on her head now, along with all those pens? Next it’ll be Tampax. . . .”
I wanted to slap her one. All of a sudden, I was feeling as restless and full as I did on Saturday nights in summer when the Nevadas brothers drove their big metallic-red hogs past the house and the music from their stupid big boom boxes, lashed onto the backseats, came up at me in my attic room, broken in pieces by the wind, and though I felt nothing at all for Ricky Nevadas, I would be like in “The Raven”—“back into my chamber turning, all my soul within me burning . . .” Why not have a guy you write to a zillion miles away? It would give you something to show off to people in the hall before school. People who thought you were just dumb or naive because you didn’t come from the big-house suburbs like Alamo Heights or Regents Landing.
“What do you think is the most interesting thing about me, Elena?”
“Your mother. Definitely.”
“I’m serious.”
“Well.” She curled up on the bench, opposite me, and stuck her finger in her history book to mark World War II. “I guess it’s that you are beautiful.”
“Shoot, I’m not. You’re beautiful.”
“No. I’m hot.” Elena’s laughter rumbled up her throat like water bursts out of a faucet left off too long. “You are beautiful. Like, your hair. You could tell him about how you wash your face with table salt to keep from getting zits or that you never cut your hair in your life.”
That was true. I only trimmed the ends and burned them with a match to stop the split ends. And I’d just learned to make my own shampoo from dishwashing liquid and honey and lemon. But so what? Guys don’t care about your hair. I told Elena so.
“I didn’t think you was thinking of him as a guy, Arley. Like a boyfriend. I just think it’s interesting. You look like Pocahontas in the movie. Tell him that.”
“I’m not thinking about him as a boyfriend. I just don’t want to sound like a stupid little girl. And, like, how do you begin this? Do I say ‘Mister LeGrande’? Or ‘Dear Friend’?”
“How about ‘Hi, Hitler’?” Elena suggested. And then we cracked up laughing.
It wasn’t until eleven o’clock when I really sat down to write the letter. The wind was blowing in the window, and it kept floating the curtain against my face like a spiderweb. I looked down, and there was Ricky Nevadas out in his backyard, in nothing but his jeans, washing his bike in the light from the streetlamp and singing the same song he always sang, “Bye Bye, Love.” He saw me in the window and whipped the towel around his head a couple of times. You could see the light shine off the drops of water or sweat on the hair under his arms. I pulled the curtain and sat on my bed.
And I wrote Dillon about my hair that hadn’t been cut in twelve years, about how Cully, the cook at Taco Haven, had to get the big-size hair net—the kind he used for his dreadlocks—for me to wear in the kitchen.
I wrote about the music I like, zydeco and the Indigo Girls, about Cam, and how he thinks he’s Kenny Wayne Shepherd or better, and I even told him that my mama had never been married—because you might as well be honest.
Except, then I wasn’t. Because I wrote about the paramedical cosmetics, too, and being in college with Connie. It got kind of fun. I was philosophizing: “Anything that makes you different can be a cause of rejection, don’t you think?” That got boring, so then I told him I ran track, because I knew it would make him think I had a good body. And then I didn’t have anything else to say. That was plenty for a first letter, especially to someone you didn’t even care whether they wrote back.
But it just didn’t feel like enough.
So I told him about my dream.
What would have happened if I hadn’t? If I’d just stopped there and left it with the problems I had with my hamstring stretches, what would have happened? Would it have been better, all the way around, if it had all stopped right there, without my ever knowing a thing about him, all that happened between us sucked right back into time like water into dry ground? Could I say that and still be true to Desi? To myself?
It doesn’t matter now. I told him about the wagon dream, which I had pretty often, starting years and years ago, from when I was little. I kept having it too, until after Desi was born. The first time, I was in second grade and the teacher was telling us about the westward expansion, about how Texas had become an independent republic and a state. I wrote to Dillon: “She told us how deprived these families were, coming out across all those miles of prairie in covered wagons, how some of the babies starved to death because their mothers didn’t have enough food to make their milk.” The funny thing about the way I heard those stories, I thought it was “colored wagons.” I could just picture them, all these bright colors, like sidewalk chalk—lime and pink and watery blue. I pictured them in my head, and I drew them for school, just strung out across fields of grass like soap beads. And when I dreamed about it, they would go up at the end, right up into the sky. “Sometimes,” I wrote in that first letter to Dillon, “I think that dream was kind of a message, that I’m waiting for a train of colored wagons, waiting so I can get on and get on out of here.” Then I was done. There just wasn’t anything at all left of my life to tell. Anyhow, it was already three pages, both sides.
Three days later, I got a letter back. It was only a page, but it came express. The postman brought it right up to the door; thank God Mama wasn’t home.
It said that my name was filled with “music” and my dream with “prophecy.” And it finished up with these lines: “I can’t abide cheap trading on real feelings. So if you think it would be a big laugh to tell your girlfriends you’re writing to a man behind bars, find a different man. I’m sure there’s plenty wouldn’t mind. Now, myself, I’m hungrier than I can rightly explain for the pleasures of real life, and they’ve been denied me for two more long years. So if you want to write, I will answer you. If you honestly want to share thoughts with me, I will respond truthfully. It was that dream about rising up and out, out of this dusty redneck hell, that made me have enough trust to do it this first time. But if you’re not that woman of energy and heart, don’t write me back. I won’t bear you ill will.”
It was signed: “Yr. obedient servant, Dillon Thomas LeGrande.”
; I couldn’t believe it. I wanted to cry, I felt so ashamed.
It was like he saw right through me. Saw me sitting there thinking maybe I could use him for some kind of status symbol at school, for proof that I wasn’t little Goody Two-shoes. It was just what he feared.
The saddest thing, though, what really grabbed my heart, was that in spite of what he suspected, he still turned to me. He was so lonely, he had to take the risk of getting betrayed. And I was the one he turned to.
I couldn’t foresee, from that first letter, what would happen with us. But I knew how it felt to be that lonely, to feel as though there wasn’t one other person in the whole world who truly cared about your feelings or your thoughts. To feel you would never be free of everything that tied your hands. And so the pull from him to me was like the pull of the earth, all that loneliness a void to be filled.
Of course it’s easy for me to say now, because I know what came afterward. But somehow I felt bound to Dillon from that first moment, simply by how much he needed me. No matter what else, I’ve never seen anything to convince me that being wanted isn’t more powerful than wanting, that it’s the most powerful thing of all.
Annie once got so mad at me when I was explaining this to her that she about went savage. She said Dillon probably tried that line about his loneliness on a dozen girls, that he was a professional manipulator, using self-pity to set the hook, and that he finally snagged someone. And maybe she’s right. But I also think that from the very beginning, Annie was jealous of the power Dillon had over me, and jealous, too, of the way we felt. After all, she knew how you could fall in love—the kind of love anyone would recognize as love, the kind that’s enough to have a life together, even—and still not feel how we did.
Or maybe it’s just different for people like Dillon and me. Annie’s not from here. She used to say she’d seen it all at her legal aid agency, but seeing it’s not the same thing. You’re still a step outside the rim. Annie’s mama would leave messages if Annie didn’t call her every single Sunday. But a phone call at the house where I lived with Mama and Cam could be to tell you someone was in jail up North or dead. You asked somebody, they’d always say kin is kin. But that doesn’t mean the same thing to people everyplace. When you grow up with all kinds of love from your blood kin, maybe you don’t have that desperate hope for someone out there waiting who can make up for all the things blood never brought you. Someone who can look deep inside you and see things no one ever bothered to tell you were there.