Читать книгу The Amado Women - Désirée Zamorano - Страница 7

After their drinks, Sylvia drove ninety minutes north to pick up her daughters at Tamara’s. Her back and stomach were beginning to ache. She wasn’t willing to take more pain meds on top of the glass of wine Celeste had ordered for her, hoping to soften the news. By the time she stepped out of the car, she was aching too much and too stiff to walk without crouching forwards. Tamara opened the door, waiting.

She was tall and elegant and wore a fashionable wrap around her shoulders. She reached out to hug Sylvia.

“You should have let them spend the night. They’re upstairs, asleep.”

Tamara released her and looked at her carefully. “You look like shit. What did the bastard do this time?”

Sylvia wanted to laugh, but only managed a small snort. “It’s what he did last time.”

“You want a glass of wine?”

“Tea,” Sylvia said, sinking into a soft armchair and waiting as Tamara fussed in the kitchen. “And aspirin,” she called out.

Sylvia closed her eyes and thought how blessed she was to have a friend who knew the worst thing about her and loved her anyway. Tamara brought in a tray with a small glass of water, a couple aspirin and a large blue and white mug.

Sylvia held the mug between her hands to warm them. And said, “‘The soul’s freedom’” and waited.

Tamara scrunched up her face. “Friendship. Anna Akhmatova.”

Sylvia smiled. Russian poetry, literature was one of their deep connections, their lawyer husbands a more superficial one. Jack liked to point out that he was all mergers and acquisitions, while Tamara’s husband was a mere litigator. Perhaps she could close her eyes, stay here with Tamara and never worry about a thing. Tamara would find a way to make it work. Tamara could move easily from wearing her power jewelry and spearheading a capital campaign for their children’s school to dancing in a track suit with the banda music at their park. Everything came naturally to Tamara. Sylvia felt as if she had to watch Tamara and the other mothers at their school, the other people at the park, to see how things were done, and then act as if she had everything figured out.

“How am I going to survive while you’re in Israel?”

“Passover’s months away. Don’t worry about it now. What did Celeste say?”

“Not months. A little over one month. Stop trying to make me feel better about it.” Sylvia sipped at the tea. Excellent, of course. “She can’t figure out what he’s done with the money. She thought I was going to hate her for giving me the bad news.” She looked at her friend and saw that Tamara was reserving judgment. “Don’t you think that’s a little ridiculous?”

Tamara raised her eyebrow. “I don’t know if that’s ridiculous. What did you tell her about Jack?”

Sylvia glanced across at Tamara, “Nothing. All she knows is that the money is missing.”

Tamara nodded. “I see she’s not the only one afraid of losing a sister.”

Sylvia struggled against the lingering pain to sit upright. “You promised,” Sylvia said. “You promised, Tamara, and if you can’t keep that promise, tell me now.”

Tamara kneeled beside the armchair and held Sylvia’s hand between hers.

“I will keep it because I love you, but it’s not right.”

“Nobody ever needs to know. Ever. You don’t understand. It would change how they look at me, think of me. Don’t, don’t, don’t let that happen.”

“And you need to do what you promised me.”

“I know, I know.”

Monday morning Celeste flew back to San Jose. Now it was over. Sylvia had taken the news about the money like the woman she was, calm and unruffled. Celeste could imagine her sitting at her immaculate kitchen counter, pouring herself another cup of coffee and planning her next step.

Sylvia and Jack had had a lot of money. Most of it was gone, and Celeste couldn’t find what Jack had done with it. In Celeste’s business, missing money meant addiction: drugs, sex, gambling. That’s the part she couldn’t tell Sylvia, because she had no proof of what Jack had done with hundreds of thousands of dollars—only that it was missing.

Celeste dug around in her bag. She opened her wallet and peered at that scrap of paper. Skye Amado Neidorf, it read. One brief, almost life, that changed everything. “This I do, in remembrance of you.”

Mercedes Amado arrived at Franklin Elementary in Santa Ana every morning at 6:30 a.m, even though school didn’t start until 8. Today she wore a softly woven linen suit, peach colored. She loved dressing up for her students. Most of her thirty-five sixth graders had mothers who were younger than her own daughters. When Mercy made phone calls home, she marveled at esas madrecitas who were often busy extricating themselves from boyfriends or in the process of pursuing new loves while leaving their sons and daughters to Mrs. Amado.

Sixty years old. She hardly believed it herself.

Each fall Mercy was happy to adopt those thirty-five sixth graders, inoculate them with her brand of philosophy and education and say good-bye at year’s end. Sometimes the infusion took, sometimes it didn’t. She had a certain reputation. Problem students were routinely transferred in and somehow became less problematic. Mercy once thought it might be interesting to follow the paths of some of her students and then changed her mind, certain that the results would only depress her. She had to focus on the class at hand, just love them for the time they were given to her.

Why couldn’t she transfer that skill to her daughters, giving them all she could for the time they were with her?

Each morning Mercy studied the photos on her desk as she prepared herself for the day. There was Celeste, her first born, graduating from Humboldt State. The cap obscured how short and spiky her hair had been, but you could see the delicate bones of her face and a small smile as she posed. That diploma had cost all of them so much, but most of all, Celeste. You could see the determination, the grimness, underneath the smile, even at twenty-two. Her sense of humor had evaporated with Skye.

There was Nataly, her baby, at her senior year’s gallery opening. Nataly’s lank brown hair straggled down to her shoulders, her face even paler in the excitement of the evening, those green eyes twinkling at the camera, at her mother.

In one, the brown heads and long braids of her granddaughters, Becky and Miriam, were capped by Mickey Mouse ears, marking the spring she had taken them to Disneyland. Miriam smiled behind Becky, her arms wrapped around her younger sister, as if protecting her from life’s unpredictability, even here at the Magic Kingdom. Becky smiled, her two front teeth missing, looking so much like Nataly at that age it always momentarily confused Mercy. “Whose little girl are you?” Mercy often asked her.

Mercy had looked forever for a photograph where Sylvia was the center of attention, not her children, where she wasn’t reaching protectively towards her husband. She settled for one in high school, where Sylvia’s full, frothy curls hit past her shoulders. As gorgeous as Cher in Moonstruck, Mercy thought.

At the far end of her desk was a picture of Celeste and Michael the weekend she visited them in Trinidad. The fog had been heavy that summer afternoon, so you really couldn’t see the craggy rocks behind them, but you got a sense of the damp air, the coast. Michael and Celeste were smiling like fools, young beautiful fools in love, Michael’s cool eyes twinkling into the camera, Celeste eight months and three weeks pregnant, breathlessly waiting, waiting, waiting.

And she’s still waiting, thought Mercy each time she saw the photograph. Celeste would die, or kill her, if she ever found this photo, which was why Mercy kept it safely on her school desk. Mercy continued to love Michael, because he had loved Celeste.

Currently there were no men in Mercy Amado’s life. At the end of the day, after organizing her desk for the next morning, then reapplying her lipstick, Mercy walked into her principal’s office. “John, I need to talk to you.” Mercy approved of her principal, John Wolfert. One, because he was attractive. And two, because he always wore a suit.

“Mercy, if it’s about the air conditioning, the district has sworn up and down it will be fixed this weekend.”

“No, John. It’s about me. I really admire you. You’ve got to know somebody.” John didn’t understand.

“Somebody, John, somebody you could fix me up with.”

“Oh,” he said. “Oh.” He swiveled sideways in his chair. “Oh.”

“Just wanted to be sure you were thinking about that,” she said. Then she went back to her classroom.

Monday night. The minute Jack stepped into the house Miriam sang out, “Dad, Mom let Becky miss school again.”

His jaw tightened. He closed the front door, shook his head, kissed Miriam’s smug face and walked upstairs without another word. He was going to talk to Becky.

Right then, Sylvia hated Miriam. She hated the cheap door Jack had walked through, the creaking stairs as he trod upwards, the cold granite counter top island where Miriam sat. They had moved to Pasadena for Jack’s law practice. Instead of ending up in a rustic Spanish, a sweet bungalow, or an imposing craftsman, Jack insisted on a new home in a gated community. Gated, for God’s sake. Was it to protect her daughters from the kind of people she herself had grown up alongside or was it to keep all the bad things inside her home from spilling out into the community?

The thin veneer of brand-spanking newness of their home swiftly rubbed off, revealing underneath the cheap materials, the haphazard design and the shoddy construction. Brand-new light fixtures didn’t work due to brand-new faulty wiring. The carpet unraveled and the kitchen countertops stained. Jack had wanted a maintenance-free, turnkey house. They had paid a mountain of money for it.

After she put the girls to bed in their rooms, she hid in the office, catching up on her Russian Lit chat group. Jack walked in.

“Why did you let Becky stay home again?”

“Her back was bothering her.”

“It’s hard enough me getting ready to go on this business trip without you destroying any shred of confidence I may have left in your skill as a mother and a homemaker.”

“So don’t go,” Sylvia said. Her eyes were fixed on the slick monitor with its bold colors. Her chat group always valued her insight into Babel or Gogol or Bukanin.

“What?”

“I told you,” Sylvia said, turning around to face him. He wore blue silk boxers. His chest muscles were well-defined and lightly covered with brown hair. She didn’t remember the boxers, but he was as fastidious about his dress at night as he was in the day. She had found it rather charming after all the grungy guys she had dated, hung around, then slept with. Jack was different. Jack was crisp and clean and smooth. Look at him, she thought. Even his pajamas sing money.

“Don’t start,” Jack said.

“I told you, you want the kids raised a certain way, you stay at home and raise them. No more arguments.” Sylvia smiled. She tried to make it as pleasant as possible.

“The problem with that, Sylvia, is that you don’t earn a red cent. You haven’t worked in eight years. You don’t make those decisions.”

“I make the decisions that affect my children in this house. And, if you’re going to second guess me every day, I’ll…” she faltered.

“You’ll what?” Just a slight raise of the eyebrows. Sylvia knew that look. “Hmmm? You want to tell me what you’ll do?”

At that moment Sylvia hated only one person more than Jack: herself, for not being able to find a way out of this. Not a way that she could live with.

Jack closed the door behind him. The steps creaked as he made his way upstairs. He was leaving tomorrow for New York, some kind of merger/arbitration/litigation/who the hell gave a shit. Sylvia stopped listening.

After a moment, she actually felt quite calm, almost happy. Jack would be gone for two weeks. That gave her plenty of time to figure out her next step. Wasn’t there a Chekhov story like that? She tapped in her question.

At the end of the day, Celeste drove to her townhome, started boiling water for the pasta she would make, then opened a bottle of wine. Pinot Noir. Oregon.

Over a bowl of pasta, she opened her laptop and ran through her own accounts online. The mortgage balance was dropping nicely—the savings, the retirement, the mutual funds, the emergency funds, all accruing at the rate she had anticipated, some even higher.

But that’s how it should be. No use having a financial planner who can’t make her own money grow. Just to spice up the emotional component, Celeste had invested in something she never recommended to her clients unless they had a tolerance for risk as well as the financial capacity to lose money—a high risk investment. This one was a telecom in Ecuador.

When it quadrupled, Celeste sold half. When it next doubled, she sold half again. Now she held on to it just to see how low it could go.

Celeste logged off. No elation, no guilt. Not even a sense of accomplishment. Just another item to cross off her list. The charitable giving that she preached to her clients manifested in her own life through monthly automatic deductions. Her returns were higher than she anticipated, so now she wrote out a number of checks, little bonuses to Save the Children, World Vision, and Doctors Without Borders. Little bonuses to the masses of people living on such a mean scale of pain and desperation that it was almost, but not quite, incomprehensible to Celeste.

Celeste had heard Oprah say, “It’s not about writing a check, it’s about touching someone else’s life.”

“No, my dear Oprah,” Celeste said out loud, “Now there you’re wrong.” It is about writing a check. It’s quick, clean, simple and easy. As long as you have the money in the bank to back it up, it’s easy to give money, but it’s hard to give of yourself.

Herself, she had conserved for her family. Where had that gotten her?—Nataly cursing at her.

Well, there was no point in thinking about that now. Celeste poured more wine. Nataly, what did she know? How long would everyone let her be a thirty-two-year-old kid? How long would everyone pretend there was actually a future in stitching remnants of material together and labeling it as some kind of lofty art?

During college, Celeste had brought up the topic of socking something away for retirement. Celeste mentioned compound interest. Nataly had looked blankly at her, yawned and changed the subject. Why did that irritate her so much?

Because, for Christ’s sake, if she had yawned when Nataly was explaining the theory behind her tactile installation pieces, Nataly would have savaged her. Nataly was an artist, after all, something beyond the comprehension of practical-minded Celeste, right? Isn’t that exactly what Nataly said?

Celeste occasionally wished she were an artist. The hideous behavior of artists was so often excused because of their occupation. Financial planners, on the other hand, weren’t given much leeway in throwing fits and living irresponsibly.

She had brought up the thought of retirement because she could see that, at the rate Nataly was going, she would be impoverished at sixty. Because she could predict that if he wasn’t stopped, her father would permanently destroy her mother’s credit and all her dreams of security. Because she knew Sylvia was on a sinking ship, with two little girls.

Two little girls. What was that like? What could that have been like?

Nataly had already trampled her heart with all the force and skill of a flamenco dancer. Celeste retreated, exiling herself even further from her family, beyond her own borders. Would Sylvia ever dare to ask Jack about the money? Cada loca con su tema. Every crazy has her thing. Celeste’s craziness was that every word and every deed reverberated into the future.

She sipped the last of the wine. That had been a decent bottle of wine, Celeste thought, glancing up at the clock. Just 9:30. Where had she picked it up, anyway?

Tuesday afternoon. As Nataly ironed the white shirt until the collar and cuffs were crisp, she recalled visiting her father’s restaurant when she was eleven, trailing Sylvia and Celeste, a few steps behind their mother. Nataly watched as the waiters inspected her sisters out of the corners of their eyes. Nataly was somehow invisible. So she improvised with a cartwheel. And it would have been just fine, except that her sneaker collided with a tray table full of salads.

Nataly slipped into the black polyester pants she hated—except that they hugged her just right—and headed to work. She supported her artistic ambitions and addictions by working in a swank restaurant in downtown Los Angeles. Rimsky’s was proud of its vodka selections and Californian-Continental cuisine. It was occasionally featured in national magazines and catered to a glamorous clientele. She had once waited on Brad Pitt, who had left her a fabulous tip. (But she hadn’t wanted his tip, had she really? She wanted her work on his walls. She wanted him to see her as the artist she was, not the server she was forced to play).

Nataly had refined her serving skills as she put herself through Otis, then CalArts. She started out at a coffee shop, then worked at a steak house, where she grew familiar with complicated drinks and menus. She got her current job through her friend Yesenia. Nataly vowed that when she made it, when her stuff was selling, she would have Rimsky’s cater the event. She pictured the enormous specialty vodkas encased in blocks of ice, decorated with leaves or flowers or twigs. A few nervous and frighteningly thin young women would circulate with the blinis, crème fraiche and salmon caviar. They would carry trays of vegetable pirozhkis. The guests at her gallery opening would mirror precisely the glamorous clientele she waited on here.

She’d show them. In the meantime, there didn’t seem to be a particularly high demand for the intricate, labor-intensive textile work that Nataly loved to create. At Rimsky’s, Nataly appreciated the delightful allure of the place, especially during a quiet moment. The bar was sleek, shiny and intoxicating in its promise, the dining area quietly opulent with its floral accents and towering wine glasses. The table linens were crisp, gleaming and luscious to the touch. Everything was there to satisfy the whim of its clients. It was the product of the hidden work of undocumented busboys and immigrant cooks. There was a connection to her textile work, Nataly knew, a connection between invisible labor and exquisite presentation.

Eric, the manager, kept asking her out. She had made the mistake of accepting once during a lonely dry spell and sleeping with him. She had felt absolutely nothing. Pleasant looking fellow, tall, black hair tied back into a short, neat ponytail. He had five different pairs of glasses and was a few years older than her—thirty-four or thirty-five. But completely ordinary. Boring. That was the worst thing Nataly could think to say about anyone or anything. The ordinary life was not worth living. No, worse was trying to pass as ordinary. Look at her sisters, Celeste. Sylvia. Look at her mother. Shit. Look at herself.

But, besides that, Eric would never mix with her friends. He could make the effort, but her friends wouldn’t let him in. She had tried one night at Yesenia’s, and it was a disaster. A few of the men and women from Otis kept asking him what he did outside of his day job, and he kept insisting managing restaurants was what he wanted to do. Eric had mortified Nataly by revealing to her crowd that his ambition in life was to own a restaurant with an A-list clientele.

Nataly pulled her Altima onto the road. What kind of dream was that? It rankled her.

She knew the restaurant business from years of watching her father manage his C-list clientele. And what was her name? Jeannie? Jolene? Earlene?—that nasal-voiced, beady-eyed waitress bitch who was always calling their house and pretending it was a wrong number. Even now, she burned a hateful smoky orange at the memory of those phone calls.

Nataly could apply for a grant. Lots of paperwork, lots of photographs, lots of networking with the people in charge of nominating, choosing and disbursing. The thought of begging for financial support on paper made her skin crawl, as if she were disrobing in front of them to gawk. She’d rather wait tables. There the contract was clear. Besides, when you were a server, you were an aesthetic object all by yourself.

Nataly arrived at work. She dropped her keys in her bag, tucked her purse safely away, said hello to the busboys. By her reckoning, it had been six months. Maybe another six months, max, and she could strike out living on her art alone. Maybe book that tentative New York showing with Yesenia. October in New York City. What would they wear?

“Vodka gimlet, Belvedere vodka, please,” said the natty-looking gentleman. Late 30s, early 40s, hair cropped close but stylish to disguise the fact that his hairline was receding. His rugged face hinted at interesting experiences and immediately appealed to her. For a moment, she wondered how that face would feel alongside her own. For just a moment.

She was thinking how cool and low his voice was when she brought him the drink, misjudged and spilled the whole thing on his lap. This was her job. This was her rent! This was the trip to the New York galleries with Yesenia. Her entire future lay in a glass of spilled ice and alcohol.

The customer shook his head. “I’d like to speak to the manager,” he said, dabbing with his cloth napkin.

This only intensified her personal misery. She gave her friend Eric a pleading look, then sent him over to table 12. Nataly hid in the kitchen.

Eric came back, his face impassive. “The client at 12 wants to speak with you.”

I will go out with a swagger, Nataly thought. She walked tall and straight and smiled sincerely, apologetically.

“It was all my fault,” the gentleman said looking up at her, staring intently into her eyes. “I’m terribly sorry.”

“You’re very kind,” she said, with much less swagger, looking away. There was something very intense in his face. Something challenging, very masculine and slightly mocking, very attractive. Good grief, now they were conspirators. They had an understanding. This could be the start of something.

Then she noticed the wedding band. And all she could do was to repeat herself, “Very kind. May I take your order?”