Monstress (4 page)

People keep coming. I try to stay close to familiar faces: I comfort Mrs. Gonzalez, Eric's second-grade teacher, who's brought the crayon portraits Eric drew for her on paper sacks. I talk with Isaac Chavez, Eric's best friend from grade school and the first boy, Eric confessed to me later, he ever loved. He never told Isaac; maybe I should. But when Isaac introduces me to his new wife, I see no need to complicate his night.

Later, when the Mendoza brothers walk in, I stay away. A long time ago, at a Fourth of July picnic, they found Eric under the slide by himself, making daisy chains, singing love songs at the top of his lungs. I watched as they called him a girl, a sissy, a faggot. “That's what you get for playing with flowers,” I told Eric later.

Ma catches me in the kitchen. “We're out of ice,” she says. Beside her is a Filipino woman rattling melting ice cubes in her plastic cup. She looks like she came to dance instead of pray: her black hair falls in waves past her shoulders, and her tight black dress is cut above the knee. In her high-heeled boots, she's taller than almost everyone here.

“No problem.” I take the cooler from the kitchen, step outside. The freezer is in the backyard, and its low hum is the only sign of life out here. The grass is weeds. Ma's roses are gone. And the four stalks of sugarcane Dad planted when he bought the house—one for each of us—have been dead sticks for years.

I take out a blue bag of ice, pound it against the concrete, breaking it up. Behind me the glass door slides open: it's the woman in the tight black dress. “This okay?” she asks. She means the cigarette between her fingers.

I slide the door shut. “It is now.”

“I'm Raquel.”

“Edmond.” We shake hands.

“The brother.” She lets go. “Cold.”

Icy flakes stick to my fingers. I wipe them on my pants. “You're friends with Eric?”

“Sisters. That's what we call ourselves, anyway.” She lights the cigarette, takes a drag, then lets out a long breath of smoke. “I have no family here. They're all back in Manila, pissed at me for leaving. So she became my sister. Sweet, huh?”
Sisters. She
. I feel like I'm being tested on what I know and don't know about my brother.

“Eric always wanted a sister.”

“Well, if we're sisters, then that makes you my kuya Edmond, right?”

“Kuya?”

“That's Tagalog for ‘big brother.' ” Without asking, she unfolds a lawn chair and sits down. She crosses her legs, rests an elbow on her knee, her chin on her hand, looks at me closely. “How are you?”

Not even the coroner asked me that, even after I saw the body. “Fine.” I squat down, smash more ice. “Holding up.”

“Not me. Last night, when you left that message at the bar, I wanted to erase it. I was thinking,
I don't know anyone named Eric, and I don't know an Eric's brother.
But I knew who you meant.”

She describes the rest of the night: how they closed the HoozHoo early, gathered the waitresses and the regulars together, drank and wept and sang songs until morning. Before everyone went home, they stood in a circle on the dance floor, held hands and said a prayer, music off but lights on, disco ball spinning above them. “It looked like heaven,” she says. “All the girls wanted to come tonight, but I told them no. It should just be me. Out of respect for your mother.”

It's like the start of a joke:
a dozen drag queens walk in on eighty Filipinos praying on their knees . . .
And I can picture the rest of it: six-foot-tall women in six-inch heels, glittering in a crowd of people dressed in black. I can see the stares, hear the whispers, Ma in the middle of it all, wishing them away. But maybe everyone would have been fooled, taken them as the very girlfriends that old ladies had pestered Eric about. Right away I knew what Raquel was, but so much of her looks real, like she was born into the body she's made.

“You're staring at my tits, hon.”

The ice slips from my hand, slides across the cement onto the dirt.

She manages a smile, shrugs. “People look all the time.” She glances at them herself. “Four years ago, when I came to the States”—she gestures at her breasts, like she's trying to display them—“there's nothing here. Just flat. All empty. So now, if people want to look, I let them. They're mine, right?” She puts out her cigarette, lights another. “It's the same thing with Erica. Hers turned out really nice, really—”

“More ice?” I reach for another blue bag. “There's ice.”

She reaches out, puts her hand on my shoulder. “I've embarrassed you. Sorry. That wasn't Coke in my cup.” Raquel pulls a silver flask from her purse, unscrews the top, and holds it upside down. “All gone,” she sighs. “I should be gone too.” She gets up, but she's off balance. “Walk me to the door?” She puts her hands on my wrist, holds it tight. I don't know that I have a choice.

We step inside, work our way through the crowds in the kitchen, the living room. People look but they don't stare, and I think we can slip out quietly. But then I see the Mendoza brothers on the couch, eyeing Raquel, smirking at one another. My guess is that they've gone from childhood bullies to the kind of men who would follow a girl to her car with whistles and catcalls.

I help Raquel with her coat. “I'll walk you to your car.”

“I'm at the end of the street.” We step outside, walk down the driveway. Raquel takes my arm again, her hold tighter this time.

“Maybe you should've had Coke after all,” I say.

“No,” she says. “I need to be this way tonight.”

We get to her car, a beat-up Honda dented all over, with a missing back window replaced with plastic and duct tape. “Time for you to go back home,” she says, leaning against the door. She searches her purse for her keys, not realizing she's holding them in her left hand.

Then she says, “Oh, shit.”

I see it: on the corner, seven women, tall and big as Raquel, empty out of a minivan and head toward Ma's house, their heels clicking loudly against the sidewalk.

“I told them they shouldn't come,” Raquel says. She takes a step toward them but I don't let her go. “It's not our problem,” I say, then take the keys from between her fingers, walk her to the passenger's door. I unlock it for her, then get into the driver's seat.

“What about your guests?” Raquel asks.

“I don't have any.” I start the car, watch the women enter Ma's house one by one. “Where to?”

“San Francisco.”

I drive down Telegraph Avenue, head for the bridge.

“You're a nice man, Kuya Edmond.” Raquel reclines her seat, turns toward the window, like she's watching the moon. “Can I call you that? Kuya?”

“Why not.” No one else will, and Eric never did.

I
t's less than ten minutes from Ma's house to the bridge, and yet I never cross it. Yesterday, when I drove to ID the body, was the first time in years that I'd been to San Francisco.

The time before that was when Ma kicked Eric out. He was seventeen. She found him in his bedroom, made up as a girl, in bed with a guy. She told them to leave, and told Eric not to come back. “For good this time,” Eric said on the phone. “But there's nowhere for me to go.” He was breathing fast and heavy, fighting not to cry.

Delia and I were living in Richmond, a good half hour away. But who else was going to help my brother? “Find a place,” I said, “and I'll drive you there.”

When I got to the house, Eric was sitting on the curb, a suitcase and an orange sleeping bag at his feet. He looked up at me, and what I thought were bruises was just makeup smeared together. “She tried wiping it off with a dishrag,” he explained. “I look awful, don't I?”

“Get in the car,” I said, then went inside to check on Ma. She was sitting at the top of the stairs, still in her Denny's uniform, Dad's terrycloth robe draped over her lap. She had just gotten home from a late shift when she found Eric. “I brought home a sandwich for him,” she said. “He doesn't want to take it. If you're hungry—”

“I'm not,” I said.

She nodded, went to her room. I heard her lock the door.

I went back outside, got in the car. Eric was in the passenger's seat, putting on lipstick. I grabbed his wrist, squeezed so hard he dropped it. “Didn't I tell you,” I was shouting now, “you don't do this here. You want to play dress-up, that's fine. But not in Ma's house. You keep it to yourself.”

“I'm not playing dress-up,” Eric said.

I started driving. “Just tell me where to go.”

Eric gave directions, and before I realized it I was on the Bay Bridge, bound for the city. He had a friend with a spare couch who lived in the Mission neighborhood. I headed down South Van Ness, turned onto a dark street that got darker the farther down we went. “Stop at the next house,” Eric said. I pulled up in front of an old peeling Victorian. “Here,” I said, and I put four twenty-dollar bills in his hand. He gave one of them back, reminded me that Mother's Day was coming up, and asked if I could get flowers for Ma.

He got out of the car, but before he closed the door he leaned in. “It was the first perfect night I ever had,” he said. “Know what I mean?”

I didn't. “Call me in a few days,” I said.

Eric walked toward the front door, dragging his things behind him. At the top of the driveway, he turned around. We looked at each other, as though neither of us knew who should be the first to go.

What I wished then I'm wishing now: that I'd reached over and opened the passenger door. Maybe then we could have made our way back to Ma's, or to a place neither of us had been to before. An all-night diner off the freeway. A road that dead-ended with a view of the city. If we'd had more time, I could have taken him home. Maybe then, things could have stayed the same.

It took me hours to find my way back to the bridge.

Ma finally spoke to Eric a year later, just in time for his high school graduation. But she never invited him to live in the house again, and he never asked to come back. Eric's room is storage space now, but mine she left as is: my childhood bed against the window, my blue desk beside it, Dad's wicker rocking chair still in the corner. It's like she knew Eric was never coming back, and I always would.

I tap Raquel on her shoulder. “We're here,” I say. “Tell me where to go.”

F
or now, Raquel is homeless; a pipe burst in her apartment building three weeks before, flooding every unit. She'd been staying with Eric ever since. Had she said this before I got in her car, I'm not sure I would have driven her home.

It takes forty minutes to find parking, and when we do, it's blocks away from Eric's building. Walking, we pass drunken college boys negotiating with prostitutes, homeless kids sharing a bottle, cops who seem oblivious to everything around them. “I get scared at night,” Raquel says. I let her keep hold of my arm.

Eric's building is on Polk Street. Two teenage girls sit on the front steps, smoking cigarettes. “New boyfriend, Miss Raquel?” one says.

“Ask me again in the morning and I'll tell you.” Raquel laughs, high-fives both girls.

We take the stairs to the third floor, head down a narrow hallway lit by fading fluorescent lights. Eric's apartment number is 310. The door is white, like all the rest. “I'd meant to visit,” I say. Raquel says nothing.

She takes the keys, lets me in. “After you, Kuya.” I don't know how I'm getting home.

Those times I spoke to Eric, I imagined him sitting on his windowsill, and what his apartment might look like: wigs and dresses piled on a red leather couch, Christmas lights framing every window, drooping down from the ceiling. It was the kind of place where I would stand in the middle with my arms folded against my chest, careful not to touch anything; I'd keep an eye on the door, ready to escape at any moment. But when I step inside, everything is muted—there's a metal desk, a cream-colored futon, a cinderblock bookshelf with a stack of newspapers and magazines. On the windowsill are two framed pictures: one is of Ma and Dad in Long Beach, when they first came to the States, and the other is of me, from a time I don't remember. I'm just a kid, four or five, looking unbelievably happy. I don't know why or how. It seems impossible to me that anyone could be that pleased with life.

Raquel offers a tissue. I tell her I'm fine.

She goes into the tiny refrigerator beneath the desk, takes out a Mountain Dew and a small bottle of vodka. She mixes them in a paper cup, stirs it with her finger.

Then she takes out a bottle of pills from her purse.

“Headache?” I ask.

“Nothing's wrong with my head.” She pops a pill in her mouth, sips her drink, makes a face when she swallows, like it hurts. “Hormones,” she says, “no pain no gain.” She takes another sip.

“There's pain.”

“Figure of speech, Kuya. It goes down easy.”

“There must be pain. There has to be.” I think of Eric on a table, surgeons cutting into his body, needles vanishing into his skin. I think of that studio audience giving him the thumbs-down, like a jury deciding his fate. I think of Ma telling Eric he was dead. “The things you do. To prove yourself. We loved him as is. That should have been enough.”

Raquel walks over, stands in front of me eye-to-eye. “You think that's why we do this? To prove a point to you? Listen, Kuya Edmond. All of this”—she unfolds her arms, takes my hand by the wrist and puts it on the center of her chest—“I did for me.” She keeps it there, presses it into herself like I'm supposed to check for a heartbeat, but she lets me go before I can feel anything.

“I should get back,” I say. She nods, walks me to the door. I make a tentative plan to stop by next week, to pick up some of Eric's things, though I'm not sure what I can rightfully claim. She says yes, of course, anytime, like she doesn't believe that I'll ever return here.