Congratulations!
Gwendolyn Zepeda
Houston, Texas
February 2019
Part I
Desirable Locations with Private Security
Tangled
by Anton DiSclafani
Tanglewood
Tangled in Tanglewood, Lisa thought as she glanced at her watch and stepped out onto her back porch.
The heat overwhelmed, because it was July in Houston and everyone who could go was gone, out to Galveston or Clear Lake or even farther. The Blue Ridge Mountains. The Great Lakes. The Olsens would leave first. Then the Ramirezes. Then the Maclains.
Lisa had not left not because she didn’t want to leave — she did, very badly — but because she had a few things to set in order, first. And then she would leave for good. Or, if not for good, for a very long time.
She stood on her porch, protected from the mosquitoes and no-see-ums by a thin layer of screen. She glanced at her watch again. It had been her grandmother’s, was what she told people. A slim Cartier with a face encircled by diamonds. No one wore watches anymore.
Lisa did.
In short order, Lisa’s history: Born to a father who worked the oil rigs in Midland, a godforsaken place. A mother who, when Lisa was young, tried to keep the dust out of their house without the aid of a vacuum cleaner. Only the rich people had them.
Even now, or especially now, Lisa closes her eyes and can so easily see her mother with her broom. The sweep, sweep that will haunt Lisa until she dies.
Lisa married a boy who lived in a two-story dustless house. At the time, the house had seemed a sign of great wealth. They were both sixteen. A shotgun wedding, nobody happy but Lisa and her new husband. Moved to La Porte so Gary could do something related to the ships. Then Pasadena. Got closer and closer to Houston, inch by inexorable inch.
Victoria was born in La Porte. Lisa thought her daughter’s name sounded regal. Like old money. Or old enough for Texas, anyway.
By the time they moved to Houston, Lisa had shed her mother and father and their dust. Her father had left when Lisa was eight, gone out west, and her mother became a recluse before she died of lung cancer. It was easy never to tell a soul about them.
So, her parents were dead when she landed in Houston in the early eighties, in a bland, nondescript neighborhood. Solidly middle class. Gary was loyal, dull except for his terrible temper, and the victim of early-onset balding. She knew it wasn’t nice, but his hair, or lack thereof, repulsed her.
They divorced when Victoria was ten. Victoria was so sensitive then, she might as well have been a tuning fork, and for a while Lisa worried the divorce had ruined her. For years, Victoria slept with her mother at night, the child’s warmth a comfort. Most days, Victoria came home from school in tears, disturbed by the minor cruelty of one girl or another.
The divorce didn’t ruin her. Neither did Lisa’s second marriage, two years later, to a cardiac surgeon who owned a home in Tanglewood. To the contrary, that marriage seemed to harden Victoria, laying a chitin over her creamy, adolescent skin. She’d never gotten pimples like other girls. That Victoria felt betrayed by her mother — it had been just the two of them for two years — was to be expected. But Lisa knew better. The marriage meant neither she nor Victoria would have to worry. About college, about paying for the wedding Victoria would eventually have, about any of life’s requirements. And Lisa was lonely. She didn’t want Victoria to grow up thinking this loneliness, this all-female household, was normal. And, most of all, there was the house.
Tanglewood: it felt like the center of things, yet the lots the houses sat on seemed enormous to Lisa. It wasn’t privacy she craved, nor space, but she knew, the moment she saw the house, she would accept Lance’s proposal. It was one of the older houses, with black shutters and a wide wraparound porch. Lance hadn’t proposed yet, but he would. Men were as readable as books.
Tanglewood did not smack of carpet and coupons. It was not one but five steps above where she’d lived with Gary. Not River Oaks and not Shady Side — places she’d once dreamed of — but close enough. Her entire life defined by an exhilarating momentum. Lately, it was also tinged with exhaustion.
How different her mother’s life would have been, had she owned a vacuum cleaner, Lisa thought whenever she saw hers.
Mornings, she liked to go outside and look at the other houses. She could just barely see them from her screened-in back porch. Flashes of stucco and brick through the neat row of sky pencils that bordered the backyard.
Lance opened the sliding-glass door. Lisa didn’t turn or give any sign she’d heard her husband as he brushed her forehead with his dry, hot lips. She sat in the porch swing as wide as a bed and held her coffee carefully so it wouldn’t spill.
“Bye,” he said on his way out, and waited for her response.
“Bye,” she said, and he was gone. They had not met each other’s eye.
Victoria opened the porch door a minute later, as if she’d timed it. She’d told Lisa, when she was twelve, that she’d never think of Lance as a father, and she never had. There was no love lost between them. She held a cup of coffee from her own home, a street over. She had large, capable hands. Lisa had always admired them.
Lisa and her daughter had coffee together most mornings. Victoria held Lisa at a distance, and had since her mother remarried, but still, they were close. There were other mother-daughter pairs in Houston, of course. It was a big city that felt like a small town, especially in Tanglewood, where everyone gathered at the Houston Country Club for cocktails on Saturday evenings, where everyone’s child went to Kinkaid, where everyone’s husband left for work before the worst of the heat started and came home after it ended.
“Hi,” Lisa said.
A pause. “Hi.” Victoria seemed distracted. She was wearing the sleek lounge pants women her age favored. She was tall and fleshy but not fat; prettier than her mother, but not as confident. Victoria knew how to plan and host a five-course dinner party, invest in the stock market, and get the yardmen to edge the grass in a way they considered fussy, but she didn’t know how to move through a room sexily. It was a quality that couldn’t be taught, Lisa supposed.
“You sound sleepy,” Lisa said carefully. She wasn’t a religious woman, but she found herself praying lately that Victoria wouldn’t get pregnant. Lord, she thought, let her be smart enough to take the pill. Her husband wasn’t the kind of man to want to prevent a pregnancy.
“I am. Tired,” Victoria said.
“Did he do it again?” Lisa tried to keep the tremor from her voice.
Victoria shook her head. “No.” She sounded annoyed, dismissive.
“It’s just—”
“Mom. It was a one-time thing.”
Lisa nodded. She hated that word: Mom. Mother was unwieldy, old-fashioned. She would have preferred Mama, but Victoria hadn’t called her that since she was a little girl, still losing baby teeth.
Lisa tried to look as if she believed her daughter. Her plan depended, for the moment, on her willingness to believe.
“So hot,” Victoria said, which seemed to be an olive branch.
“Yes,” Lisa murmured, “yes.” She was eager to agree.
Victoria pulled a chair away from the table and slumped into it. Lisa was often struck by how young she still seemed, even though her daughter was thirty, married to a corporate attorney, in charge of a house. “Speaking of which, the yard is dry as a bone. The water restrictions.” She sighed. “I’m tired of this drought.”