Carry Me Like Water (15 page)

Cinco de mayo, 1954. El Paso

She stood over the stove making dinner, the baby asleep in a basket near the screen door that led to the alley. There was a hint of the coming summer heat in the breeze that blew softly into the warm kitchen. Her
older son, three years old, played with wooden blocks worn with use next to his slumbering brother. She watched them as she turned over a tortilla on the comal. “Your Dad will be home soon,” She had not seen him for two days. She fluctuated between worry and rage. She kept herself from falling into a panic, a panic that would make her insane. Who would care for her children? He had been gone for longer stretches at a time, yes, much longer. He had promised to be faithful, and perhaps he had been faithful, but it was not another woman that took him away from her. She had not counted on his drinking. As she turned over a tortilla, she wished he was addicted to women instead of to the bottle—a woman she could fight. I should leave him, she thought. A man looked at me today at the market—he looked at me with want. Twenty-one is not old, not too old. She shook her head. She put the stupid thoughts out of her head. She had allowed him too much power. It was too late for her. She would forgive him, forgive him for everything. He’s a good man, she thought. When he’s sober, he has no equal, the best. I married the very best. She made a vow to herself to stop nagging him about his drinking. I make it worse, she whispered, I make him stay away. When he comes back, I will make him want to stay. She bit her lip and whispered his name: “Ricardo, te estoy esperando.” She pictured herself walking with him down the street, arm in arm, she in a flowered dress, he in a white shirt and khakis—the most beautiful couple in the barrio. She rolled out the last tortilla on the table, looked at her children, and noticed that a man was standing at the door. She held up the rolling pin like a bat.

“
It’s me,” he said.

“You scared me. Pasale.” Luz liked her brother-in-law. He had become overly anglicized in manner and speech, but he was kind and he loved her children. He stepped inside, picked up the boy playing with blocks, and kissed him on the forehead. She noticed a strange look of worry on his face.

“
Antonio, what is it?”

He said nothing. He put the child back where he had been sitting and put a block in his small hand.

“
Antonio?”

He tried to speak.

She grabbed him by the shoulders and shook him.

“
It’s Ricardo,” he whispered.

“
No,” she said, Luz slapped him, already knowing the news, already denying it, already wanting to blame the messenger.

“
They found him,” he said.

She slapped him again.

He held her against his chest

“
On the street.” he whispered, “this morning.”

She did not ask what had happened, she did not want to know. She held the picture of them together walking down the street, the spring breeze blowing softly against the skirt of her dress. She dug her face into the shoulder of her brother-in-law.

Yean later, Luz tried to remember if she had cried or not. It was a long time before she could bring herself to touch her children—they looked too much like her Ricardo. She did allow herself to remember how much she had loved him, and she did not even let herself know that she looked for him in all the lovers she had ever taken.

Luz looked around her small house. She took off her shoes and felt the coolness of the cement floor. At least the cement was still cool—so long as she hid it from the sun. She stood before the curtains she’d made herself. She kept the house dark in the summer because the darkness softened the hard heat of the desert. Today, the darkness provided little relief from the heat.
Lluvia, San Martin, Iluvia. We need the water.
As she flung the curtains open, the light flooded into the room. She opened the windows. She saw her surroundings clearly. For an instant she hated the poverty she struggled so hard to love, to embrace. Today, the sight of her house made her sad and sick, sad and sick as the brown river that pretended to be a border between Juárez and El Paso. She felt a vague rage rise from her stomach to her throat like an ugly word wanting to find its way into the air. Luz would not let the word out—she would not speak it. She felt calmer when she sat down in a rocking chair her mother had given her. She stared at her books on the opposite wall and shook her head.

She rested for a moment, then rose and turned on a small fan she kept on the kitchen table. She thought of moving to El Paso—she could move there anytime she wanted—it was her home, her
country. Her mother had chosen her nationality for her. She had waited until she was about to deliver, then walked into a clinic. She had been born a U.S. citizen in an ambulance on the way to the county hospital. She wondered why she had to choose between Juárez and El Paso, Everyone had always expected her to choose. But she would not choose,
would never choose.
She had spent a lifetime not choosing. She could not relinquish her Juárez because her family had lived in this ragged city for generations; it was her blood, her history, her inheritance; but she could not relinquish El Paso because it was the piece of dirt her mother had bequeathed to her; it, too, was her blood; it, too, was her history. When she first began working as a maid, she had hated El Paso more than she thought she could hate anything, hated the gringas who hired her and gave her their leftover clothes, their leftover food, their leftover conversations. They thought she knew no English because she spoke to them only in Spanish, and it was a disgusting thrill to know everything they said when they thought she could not understand their North American words. They assumed she was illiterate because she worked with her body. She had more books in her house than any house she’d ever cleaned. When she laughed at Diego for reading too many books, she knew she was laughing at herself.

At times, she could have killed the women whose houses she cleaned for their arrogance, for their sense of superiority, their great pride in their whiteness, their nationality—but she hated their men even worse. One man promised her papers for a blow job. He had pulled her neck toward his crotch. She bit his hand. Her English appeared before him like Guadalupe had appeared to Diego at Tepayac. “I don’t need no papers,” she’d smiled. “I’m a citizen. And
I
have rabies so you better get a shot.” Before she had quit, she informed his wife—in English—about her husband’s advances. “Why should I believe you?” she’d shouted. “Because I’m a woman,” she’d yelled back. She never went back. After that, she chose her employers with care though they always believed it was they who chose her. She hated El Paso because it wanted to be an all-American city, wanted to pretend to be the heart of a great country, but could never be anything but a city on the fringes of Gringoland because too many people like her inhabited it, worked
it, worshipped it, loved it until it disappeared into them. She had worked in El Paso all her life, had cleaned so many houses that her hands reeked of gringo dirt and gringo sweat and gringo shit. And yet she loved it—because she knew what everyone in Juárez knew, knew that El Paso belonged to them, belonged to the border, would never be like the rest of America because their faces were printed on its land as if it were a page in a book that could never be torn out by any known power, not by God, not by the Border Patrol, not by the president of either country, not by the purists who wanted to define Americans as something organic, as if they were indigenous plants. Luz laughed. El Paso was hers and she felt it like she felt the presence of the saints on her altar, and she would not relinquish it to any gringo—or any Chicana—who was not intelligent enough to acknowledge she was entitled to its poverty
and
its riches.

Luz felt sick, and she needed to know the sickness, heal it. She thought of Diego, his raw intelligence, and his sense of wonder. He carried a great sadness she could not lift, and yet she found it disturbing that he was such an innocent. He was too old to be an innocent—he had no right to be one. She stared again at the picture of her sons. She had done badly with them, had been too harsh. After the death of their father, she had lost something of her ability to love. But she would not do badly with Diego. He was the only man she’d ever met that was capable of any kind of faithfulness. She wanted—needed—to protect him. But today she knew her sickness would not go away. More than she wanted to protect him, she needed time to rest—not from work—but from this place that was her. She stared at San Martin and waited for an answer. Finally, she heard him speaking to her. She could hear him whispering
Chicago, Chicago, Chicago.
She waited for Carlos to come and visit. When he arrived, he said he would take her with him.
But I will be back, my Diego. I will be back to take care of you.

14

J
OAQUIN WALKED
into the living room and shook his wet hair like a puppy. “Want breakfast?” he asked. “I’m starved.” He threw himself on the couch, then rolled onto the floor.

“What’s gotten into you?”

“Nothing—I’m just hungry, Jacob. It’s as if I haven’t eaten for months. I just want to eat and eat.”

“A real appetite, J?”

“I don’t want to be J—not today.”

Jacob nodded. “Joaquin,” he said. “Stay,” he wanted to scream. “Stay with me forever.”

“I haven’t felt this good in months. The poison pills I take must be working—at least today anyway.”

Jake smiled but said nothing.

“Wipe that I-told-you-so grin off your face. I hate it when you gloat.”

Jacob laughed. “I’m right about the medicine—and you know it. I enjoy being right.”

“Well, what the hell—it doesn’t happen that often. You want breakfast?”

“I’ll make it.”

“You always make it, Jake. Let me do it.”

Jacob nodded. “OK. Let’s see—I’ll take two eggs over easy, English
muffins lightly toasted, a side of hash browns, and freshly squeezed orange juice.”

Joaquin opened the refrigerator door. “We’re fresh out of oranges, fresh out of English muffins, and the potatoes are growing roots. Better run to the store, gringo.”

“Gringo hates grocery shopping. If Joaquin is feeling so great, why doesn’t he go grocery shopping?”

“Joaquin doesn’t want to waste the best day he’s had in months on a trip to the store. Why don’t we just go out?”

“There’s an idea.”

“I’m serious, Jake.”

“Well, it sounds serious, anyway.”

“I have to get out of this apartment. I’m gonna go crazy. I haven’t been out for a couple of weeks. I feel like a dog in a kennel.” “What if you get overtired?”

“What if we stay home and get killed in an earthquake?” Joaquin laughed, but Jake shook his head.

“C’mon, honey, let’s go out.”

“Honey?”

“I forgot you don’t like to be called that too—too domestic, too feminine.” He laughed. “Come on, Jacob Lesley—let’s you and me go out.”

“I don’t want you to get sick, Joaquin.”

“I have AIDS, Jacob,
I am sick!”

Jake slammed his fist on the table. “Don’t use that word. J hate that word—you know I hate it.”

“I hate that word as much as you—but it’s not the word that’s killing us, Jake.”

“You promised not to use that goddamned word.” He shook his forefinger at his lover.

“It was a stupid promise. I’m dying, goddamnit—
but I’m not dying today
—today I’m going out, today I’m dressing up, today I’m going to enjoy being alive without being afraid.” He waited for Jake to say something, but nothing came out of his lips. He watched as Jake sat there clenching his teeth trying to reel in the rage that often threatened to possess him completely. He waited, and when he felt the threat had passed, he spoke again: “You can’t save me.” He
paused, considering what he would say next. “It’s not your fault,” that’s what he wanted to say, “it’s not your fault.” Before he said anything else, Jacob interrupted him.

“If I can’t keep you healthy—then what the hell can I do?”

“Take me to breakfast and a movie.”

Jake rose from his chair and held him. “Why am I always fighting you?” he whispered.

“It’s how you love.”

“I hate the way I love.”

“Don’t hate it. Please don’t hate it.”

“Why are we whispering?”

“So no one will hear.”

Jacob laughed. “No one’s here but us.”

Joaquin raised his voice and talked into his neck. “We could eat breakfast at some joint, take a walk around the city, go to an afternoon movie—maybe see some friends—what do you say, Jake?”

Jake kissed him on the forehead. “How about if you dry your hair first?”

Joaquin dug his head deep into Jake’s chest. “OK,” he said. “You know, I feel almost normal today.”

“Then let’s have an almost-normal day.”