Hard Red Spring (55 page)

“Any why do you care? You want to know why I take your class. I want to know why—”

“And one democratically elected president,” Telema said, ignoring Jean's question, “with one rewritten constitution, could have brought it all down.”

Telema, Jean noticed, ignored personal questions and did not ask many basic ones herself. Jean was beginning to feel like a whetstone, just an inanimate object against which Telema kept herself sharp. She didn't mind so much, she decided. She enjoyed the semblance of conversation, especially now that she couldn't speak to her own daughter for fear of being tattled on to the therapist. Jean missed Maya at that moment, but she could do nothing about it. She missed her daughter perpetually, she missed her while standing in the same room with her.

“Imogene, Imogene,” Telema mused in her empty house, like an echo. She brought her hand down to her open crotch and fiddled absently.

“I prefer Jean. Are you close to finished with your book?” Jean could still see the silhouette in the car, a rhythmic elbow. Telema, Jean realized, had been playing to him all along. Had been playing Jean to him, too. The thought of a stranger watching her make love did not horrify Jean, as she expected. How did she feel? Sexy, dangerous, wanted.

“I haven't written any of it yet, but I've been investigating for quite some time. I'm close. I'm going to Boston in a few weeks to track down my subject.”

“You've not written any of it? Not even an outline?”

“No. But I have the title.”

“What's that?”

“It's called . . .” And here she paused pensively, pornographically. She reclined, considering the value of the information, before finally handing it over with an opening palm. The one that had been in her crotch. “Lost Little Girls: The Myth of the Sexual Savage in U.S. Economic and Foreign Policy.”

~~~~~

The next morning, Maya was up and in her bikini in five minutes, ready for her vacation to begin. She strutted, showing off the black bikini with pink piping. It had been a concession in the Guatemala battle, her first bikini.

Sipping her coffee, Jean made her way down to the screen door of the meditation garden. Maya already lay in the morning sun, talking to herself.

“So, what do you do? Oh, that's interesting,
very
interesting. I love clothes!”

It took Jean a moment to notice a man sitting a distance away. A white businessman in a black suit, lounging in the shade, sucking on a banana drink.

Maya flipped onto her belly, flipped out the tag on her suit bottom. “This bikini was made in Guatemala. Isn't that funny? Maybe it was made in your factory!”

The man, in vintage horn-rimmed glasses, listened with disinterested politeness.

“Do you recognize it?” Maya posed, tipping her sunglasses down. “Why don't you put on
your
bathing suit?”

That was enough for Jean. She strolled in at that moment, overdoing the act of just arriving. “Maya!” she called with a jolly wave. Behind her, the screen door slammed like a shot, startling everyone. “Do you want to come to the Catholic church?”

“No,” Maya said flatly, turning back to the sun.

The Catholic church had been the site of the orphanage during Maya's time. The orphanage had moved since then, just outside town, taking all its records along.

“Maya, c'mon. Let's go to the cathedral together. It's supposed to be beautiful.” She tried the maneuver from the day before, placing her arm around Maya's shoulders, but Maya shrugged her off.

“I don't care how beautiful it is. It's just a trick so people mistake beauty for God.”

Jean stared, knowing exactly where this came from. She counted to ten and watched her own warped reflection, pointy head and shovel jaw, in her daughter's plastic gaze. “Wherever did you get that idea?”

Maya propped herself up on a saucy elbow. “Grandma. She says that Catholics worship statues because they don't know the difference between beauty and God. She says Satan is very beautiful, too, and one day I'll meet him and shouldn't be fooled.”

Not even in Guatemala could Jean escape it. How long would she have to knock down the ridiculous straw men her mother continually placed in the path of her daily life? So breathtakingly stupid, so easy to defeat, but after decades Jean felt exhausted. Lately, Maya had become an unlikely ambassador of these ideas. She had yet to figure out that she'd never see her grandparents again. That was a conversation Jean would save for after the Roots Tour.

“Grandma doesn't know a thing about Catholics, Maya. I don't think she's ever even been in a Catholic church.”

“Neither have I, but I know what they look like. I've seen pictures and TV.”

The TV, too, would haunt her forever. She had walked in on Maya not
long ago, watching some evangelical preacher. When Maya was younger, science and reason had been enough. Jean had bought her a science kit to make rainbows when she had asked why the sky was blue. But now that she'd grown older, Maya had begun to have a disturbing respect for mystery. She no longer asked the why of anything. That was the one thing Jean feared more than boys. Much to her distress, her daughter had become curious about God.

“Catholics don't worship the statues,” Jean told her. “The statues are just symbols. They're art meant to capture the essence of their belief.”

“Why are you defending them? You don't believe in God. You think Catholics are just as silly as Grandma does.”

“I don't think they're silly. I just don't believe what they believe.”

“And neither does Grandma or me. So we don't go to their church. Why do you even go if you don't believe?”

“There are more important things than believing, Maya.”

“Like what?”

“Like appreciation. I don't believe what they believe, but I can appreciate their architecture, I can admire their belief.”

“You don't admire Grandma's belief.”

“I don't have to admire it, I was raised in it. And I know that their belief is the belief that everyone but them is going to hell. There's nothing to admire in that.”

“Grandma doesn't believe I'm going to hell. I'm saved. I was saved when I was eight.” Yes, her daughter knew just how to provoke her. Angry, no doubt, about the shallow pool, the lack of ocean, the inevitable union of Brett and Maureen, the embarrassment of simply having a mother in front of the sexy businessman.

Jean needed a beer. She considered going to drink with the NGOs, instead of the church. Raising a teenager, she guessed, was about as stressful as documenting atrocities. Glancing up at the man in the suit, she could see he had been listening. Jean changed the subject, slightly. “Grandma shouldn't have said that about you meeting Satan. Does that scare you?”

“It did a long time ago, but not anymore.”

How old had she been? Of course Jean's mother would say that, even to a four-year-old Maya. Satan stalking the streets, very beautiful and looking for her.

“Because there's no such thing as Satan. People invented him to explain away the evil in their own hearts.”

Maya pondered this and nodded, the whole sky tilting in her lenses. “Yeah, I believe that.” Jean's parents had won a battle, but not the war. Maya believed she was saved, but to her it didn't mean much to her everyday life. She was saved, much like other people were insured.

“I totally forgot Grandma telling me that, until I saw your friend Telema,” Maya admitted. The situation, though diffused, had moved on to a matter just as painful.

“You never met Telema before the airport, did you?”

“I saw her once, when Brett drove me home. She was pulling out of the driveway in a horrible car. The exhaust made me cough and burned my eyes.”

“You thought she was Satan?”

“It was very childish.” She spoke of decisions she'd made just months ago in this manner. She was constantly improving herself, she believed, aging years in a single day. “I just remembered what Grandma said, for some reason. Telema is very beautiful. And I started to wonder why you never introduced me to her.”

—

Jean knew churches never changed much, and so, walking inside Xela's cathedral, she imagined these were the same saints, in the same slow shafts of light, that had, in 1983, set their mournful, painted eyes on baby Maya. Perhaps she had been left underneath one of the statues for the nuns to find. Jean summoned the dried-out, emotionless scream the infant Maya had let out at the Los Angeles airport. A scream that did not expect to be appeased. That scream, which endured for much of a year, drove away the last of Jean's old friends.

For almost twelve years, Maya had given Jean everything she needed. Companionship, purpose, love, acknowledgment from the world. Jean did not much miss her friends or her sex life. She'd always loathed her own parents, felt no kinship to them, and now finally she understood what others meant when they spoke of family with devotion. Even the stigma of single motherhood couldn't ruin her newfound contentment. Almost everyone, in the end, respected motherhood. For years, Maya mimicked the way she read, walked, and used her phrases with pride. A whole, happy child grew from the screaming, scarred infant that arrived in her arms. In a few months, a black mat of hair grew in on Maya's head, hiding the scar for good.

In Xela's cathedral, Jean tried to imagine Maya's infant scream changing the expression of the saints presiding above in painted indifference. Was
that on purpose, Jean wondered, with Catholics? Were the statues meant to stare you down, make you feel you had committed some great wrong, even if you couldn't remember what it was? Guilt was useful, Jean believed, and too much was better than not enough. She had been raised Pentecostal, where guilt only occurred in retrospect, generations later.

Jean was here, she felt vaguely, to repent for her parents, who were masters in evading their own guilt. They would never know the destruction caused by their beliefs, though indisputable evidence had arrived in their mailbox months before, bound with a binder clip, and highlighted in the relevant sections. Her parents had given money to the thing called Operation Open Arms.

Jean, aware of the civil war in Guatemala, was applying to adopt when her parents called to tell her of their latest charitable cause. They, who forever clipped coupons and could not afford air-conditioning, gave a hundred dollars to Pat Robertson and his friend Ríos Montt. And despite the scholarship coming out now, despite the years of research and investigation by the Historical Clarification workers she'd seen in the vegetarian restaurant, despite the recent UN report cataloguing their findings and the abuses of Ríos Montt's rule, her parents still would never know. Truth, now, was filed away in library catalogues, filed into oblivion. Truth did not make the news.

One hundred dollars. How many rounds of ammunition would that buy? How many yards of road would it build? Jean imagined the receipt her parents received in the mail, after their contribution. One hundred dollars buys you one heathen soul. She imagined them stapling the receipt to their tax return, to get the deduction.

On her last visit, Jean had confronted her mother directly about her contribution to Open Arms, and had been amazed (though she shouldn't have been) to have made no impression at all. The human life span, Jean marveled, was just long enough to avoid the truth with willful, tactical ignorance. Just long enough for evil to thrive.

Thinking of evil, Jean remembered the man in the suit with his banana drink. So out of place in the meditation garden, in Guatemala, and in 1999 in general. Even his haircut seemed from a different era, a very Cold War look. He would have to have his hair cut every week to keep it up. Who did that anymore? Jean distrusted men in suits, and as she pondered the nature of evil, she envisioned men in suits. She replayed Maya flirting with the man, cocking her hip, tipping her glasses, flipping the tag out from her bottom.
The man watching her with his mouth attached to his banana drink. Jean had thought he was politely ignoring Maya, but now she began to think that maybe that wasn't what he had been doing. Was he even a guest? She imagined the two alone in the meditation garden, Maya completely set on impressing this man with her new bikini. The hotel empty but for the proprietor sweeping remote corners, mumbling to herself.

Jean ran out of the church before she could decide if she was being irrational. Pushing off the pews for speed, she ran five blocks, to find the proprietor standing at the front door in the same nightgown dress, scrubbing away at the blue hand graffiti. A man in a green NGO polo shirt argued at her back.

“There's no vacancy,” she said repeatedly.

“Can you let me in?” Jean gasped. Both the NGO and the proprietor turned to her, but neither of them moved beyond this.

“I need in, please!” Jean repeated, but it became clear that the more frantic she sounded, the less willing the proprietor would be to help her. “Have you seen my daughter in there? Is she okay?” Jean asked, more calmly.

“Your daughter is at the pool. She's fine,” the proprietor replied, turning back to her scrubbing. For a moment, Jean thought she was scrubbing at the blue hand itself, but she could see now that someone had graffitied the graffiti. Red paint spurted from the two fingers so that instead of curled into the palm, they looked as if they had been lopped off and were bleeding. The proprietor, with a brush and soapy water, attacked the red paint.

Jean hooked her fingers into the ironwork gate. “When's the last time you saw her?” She felt calmer now, seeing one of the staff enter the meditation garden.

“She says there's no vacancy. Do you have a room here?” the NGO demanded.

“Yes,” Jean said.

“Well, are the rooms full?”

“Listen, I just want to get inside to my daughter. Can you please let me in?”

“Were there other guests here last night?”