And I see you, walking in alleys, sitting in vacant lots crowded with weeds, Queen Anne’s lace dotted with rain. You think you cannot bear losing that weakling, Claire. Remember, there’s only one virtue, Astrid. The Romans were right. One can bear anything. The pain we cannot bear will kill us outright.
But I didn’t believe her for a second. Long ago, she told me that to slash each other to ribbons in battle each day and be put back together each night was the Vikings’ idea of heaven. Eternal slaughter, that was the thing. You were never killed outright. It was like the eagle feeding on your liver by day and having it grow back, only more fun.
26
THE TRAINS ACROSS the river rolled on iron wheels, making a soothing percussion in the night. On our side, back by the bakery, a boy was playing electric guitar. He couldn’t sleep either, the sound of the trains stirred him. His guitar bore his longing up into the darkness like sparks, a music profound in its objectless desire, beautiful beyond solace or solution.
In the other bed, Yvonne was restless. The maple frame groaned under her weight when she turned. She had eight weeks to go and I couldn’t imagine her getting any larger. The swell of her belly rose above the plane of sheet in a smooth volcanic dome, a Mount Saint Helens, Popocatepetl, ready for eruption. Time was moving in the room, in the music of the trains, ratchet by ratchet, a train so vast it needed three locomotives to roll its bulk through the night. Where did the trains go, Mother? Were we there yet?
Sometimes I imagined I had a father who worked nights for the railroad. A signalman for the Southern Pacific who wore heavy fireproof gloves big as oars, and wiped sweat from his forehead with a massive forearm. If I had a father who worked nights for the railroad, I might have had a mother who would listen for the click of the door when he came home, and I would hear her quiet voice, their muffled laughter through the thin walls of the house. How soft their voices would be, and sweet, like pigeons brooding under a bridge.
If I were a poet, that’s what I’d write about. People who worked in the middle of the night. Men who loaded trains, emergency room nurses with their gentle hands. Night clerks in hotels, cabdrivers on graveyard, waitresses in all-night coffee shops. They knew the world, how precious it was when a person remembered your name, the comfort of a rhetorical question, “How’s it going, how’s the kids?” They knew how long the night was. They knew the sound life made as it left. It rattled, like a slamming screen door in the wind. Night workers lived without illusions, they wiped dreams off counters, they loaded freight. They headed back to the airport for one last fare.
Under the bed, a darker current wove itself into the night. My mother’s unread letters, fluid with lies, shifted and heaved, like the debris of an enormous shipwreck that continued to be washed ashore years after the liner went down. I would allow no more words. From now on, I only wanted things that could be touched, tasted, the scent of new houses, the buzz of wires before rain. A river flowing in moonlight, trees growing out of concrete, scraps of brocade in a fifty-cent bin, red geraniums on a sweatshop window ledge. Give me the way rooftops of stucco apartments piled up forms in the afternoon like late surf, something without a spin, not a self-portrait in water and wind. Give me the boy playing electric guitar, my foster home bed at the end of Ripple Street, and the shape of Yvonne and her baby that was coming. She was the hills of California under mustard and green, tawny as lions in summer.
Across the room, Yvonne cried out. Her pillow fell on the floor. I got it for her. It was spongy with sweat. She sweated so much at night, I sometimes had to help her change the sheets. I put the pillow behind her dark hair, pushed the soaked strands from her face. She was hot as a steaming load of wet laundry.
The guitar unraveled a song I could only occasionally recognize as “So You Want to Be a Rock and Roll Star.”
“Astrid,” Yvonne whispered.
“Listen,” I said. “Someone’s playing guitar.”
“I had the worst dream,” she mumbled. “People kept stealing my stuff. They took my horse.”
Her felted paper horse, white with gold paper trappings and red silk fringe, sat on the dresser, front leg raised, neck curved into an arch that echoed the frightened curve of her eyebrows.
“It’s still there,” I said, putting my hand on her cheek. I knew it would feel cool on her hot skin. My mother used to do this when I was sick, I suddenly remembered, and for a moment I could feel it distinctly, the touch of her cool hands.
Yvonne lifted her head to see the horse still prancing in the moonlight, then lay back on the pillow. “I wish this was over.”
I knew what Rena would say. The sooner the better. A few months ago, I’d have gone her one further. I would have thought, what was the difference? When she gave birth to the baby, once it had been given away, there would always be something more to lose, a boyfriend, a home, a job, sickness, more babies, days and nights rolling over each other in an ocean that was always the same. Why hurry disaster?
But now I had seen her sitting cross-legged on her bed whispering to her belly, telling it how great the world was going to be, that there were horses and birthdays, white cats and ice cream. Even if Yvonne wouldn’t be there for roller skates and the first day of school, it had to count for something. She had it now, that sweetness, that dream. “Yeah, when it’s time, you’ll think it’s too soon,” I said.
Yvonne held my hand to her hot forehead. “You’re always cool. You don’t sweat at all. Oh, the baby’s moving,” she whispered. “You want to feel it?”
She shoved up her T-shirt and I put my hand on her bare belly, round and hot as rising dough, to feel the odd distortions of the baby’s movements against my palm. Her smile was lopsided, divided, delight warring with what she knew was coming.
“I think it’s a girl,” she whispered. “The other one was a girl.”
She talked about her babies only late at night when we were alone. Rena wouldn’t let her talk about them, she told her not to think about them. But Yvonne needed to talk. The father of this one, Ezequiel, drove a pickup truck. They had met at Griffith Park, and she fell in love when he put her on the merry-go-round.
I tried to think of something to say. “She’s got a good kick. Maybe she’ll be a ballerina, ese.”
The simple melody line of the electric guitar bounced off the hills and fed in through the window, and the mound of Yvonne’s stomach danced in time, the tiny bumps of hands and feet.
“I want her to do Girl Scouts. You’re gonna do Girl Scouts, mija,” she said to the mound. She looked back up at me. “Did you ever do it?”
I shook my head.
“I always wanted to,” she said, tracing figure eights on the damp sheet. “But I couldn’t ask. My mom would’ve laughed her head off. ‘Your big ass in the damn Girl Scouts?’ ”