Authors: Bradford Morrow
“You okay?” Marcos asked.
“Just surprised, is all.”
“That’s the idea.”
Two hours later, at the fiesta in Old Town Albuquerque, she saw one of her brothers across a crowded concession area billowing with violet smoke. She gasped. Instinctively glancing back toward where her own party had been absorbed into the crowd, she locked eyes with Kip. He’d noticed her blanching and half smiled at her—what else could he do?—before turning to see what she was looking at. No one stood out, nothing unusual seemed to be going on. Confused, he raised his eyebrows and shrugged, as if to ask, What’s wrong? Do you need help? Marcos walked up to her meantime.
“What have you been up to?” she asked, grateful for the reprieve from having to answer Kip.
“I found a birthday present at one of the booths.”
“Being here with you guys is gift enough.”
“Hardly.” Holding up a small brown paper bag, Marcos added, “Besides, it’s a done deal. I’ll give it to you later.”
She thanked him with a kiss on the cheek and said, “Speaking of which, it’s getting kind of late don’t you think?”
“We only got here an hour ago.”
“Maybe we should have lunch. I know a place near Placitas.”
“Well, it’s your day. Let me go find Carl and Sarah.”
Kip stood standing, as they say. Franny glanced again in the direction of her brother John, who had vanished into the ranging crowd of fiestagoers. Then she turned back to Kip.
“What are you looking for?”
“Nothing, why?” she lied, then changed the subject. “I don’t know about you, but I’m not that used to people caring whether it’s my birthday or not. Haven’t celebrated mine in years.” No sooner had her wistful remark slipped out than she asked herself, Why do I keep revealing myself to this man?
“You’re too young not to celebrate birthdays.”
She scumbled the moment, saying, “When’s your birthday, Kip?”
“I don’t have one.”
“They just dropped you here from another universe.”
“How did you know?”
“Really. When were you born?”
“Post-Christmas, nineteen forty-four. Between the Savior’s birth and the atom bomb. Rude syzygy.”
Where were the Montoyas? She had to get out of here. “What?”
“When the planets align. Causes strange things to happen.”
Franny felt compelled to pat Kip gently on the back. A gesture of affection. Of unmeditated fellowship. She was surprised by how thin he remained, yet how sturdy and solid he’d grown.
“Come on, Mary. What were you looking at before?”
“I told you not to call me that.”
“No one heard but you.”
“I thought I saw somebody I knew.”
“Your worst enemy or just a stray demon? You didn’t look too happy about whoever it was.”
“It’s not that. Just somebody I haven’t seen in a long time.”
“None of my business.”
“Doesn’t matter,” she said. “I was wrong, anyway.”
She put her hands in her pockets and stared at the pavement.
Kip said, “You know, if you ever need to talk to me some more about what you brought up a couple months back, I can be a pretty good listener. Not judgmental. Can’t afford to be.”
“You have kids?”
He shook his head.
“That’s too bad. You’d have made a good father.”
“I doubt that very much.”
“Well, I don’t,” and glanced up suddenly mindful that there was every chance her own father was somewhere in this throng.
Positioning herself subtly behind Kip, she searched the torrent of faces—so many cultures mixed in among them, people democratized by where they lived and the blue jeans they, like Franny, wore—and located her oldest brother, Jimmy, as well as her sister, Rose, who stood watching the electric band Cinco de Mayo with their mother and, yes, Russell Carpenter, her detested father. As fortune would have it, their backs were turned to Kip and Franny. They seemed to be enjoying themselves, swaying to the distorted music. Her father had put on weight since she last laid eyes on him, while her mother looked to be diminished by half. Jimmy wore a smartly pressed khaki uniform and a Stetson and had his arm around a young woman whom she didn’t recognize. Had he gotten married? Was he in the service, after all those years of screaming, unpatriotic skirmishes with dear old Dad? Rose had grown her hair long, as had her twin brother, John, who now joined the group. Kind of a surprise given how strict Russell had always been about such life-and-death matters as personal grooming. Maybe he was slipping, losing sway over the lot of them. She’d like to think her departure had to do with this subversion, but was startled from such musings when her sister, who’d been talking animatedly with John, turned around and seemed to look directly at her.
She had to escape, right away, and without creating a scene. Still, she gazed for one clipped instant at her mother with whom Rose was now speaking excitedly, and saw how these few years had reduced her, pulled her unkindly toward the ground, wrenched down the corners of her mouth, a mouth that once had been as full and young as Mary’s own. Stung a little by guilt and overwhelmed by frantic fear, she asked Kip if he didn’t mind walking her back to the Jeep. She wasn’t feeling well, all of a sudden. He took her arm and the two of them threaded their way to the parking lot. Having noticed everything, Kip said nothing. Carl was asleep in the front seat, and within minutes they were joined by Marcos and Sarah, whose arms were full of gifts.
On the drive to Placitas, Franny sat in the back between Marcos and Kip, whose cooperative silence extended to his making no mention of Franny’s abrupt recovery. “Hey, who is Felipe de Nerí, anyway?” she asked, using all the acting skills available to her.
Nobody knew, except Carl, who said, “Just another Italian saint from a thousand years ago. Dime a dozen.”
“He should know. They were friends back then.”
Nodding toward Marcos, Sarah asked Franny, “This is the kind of man you go around with?”
“You’re his mother,” she laughed.
“That’s right, Franny. You tell her,” Carl said, mock-serious.
Franny bundled up the vision of her Gallup family as if into a little crumpled ball that she then threw, mentally, out the window, but couldn’t help wondering if any of them remembered that today was her birthday. Of course they did, she assured herself. But why care?
After a celebratory dinner that night at Rancho Pajarito, after opening her presents and blowing out the candles on a cake, she lay in bed with Marcos, her back turned to her lover. The silver necklace he’d given her felt unfamiliar against her flesh, but she was grateful and was sure she’d grow accustomed to its weight there. His callused but supple hand moved from her neck down the small of her back to rest on her hip. She whispered his name as his fingers waterfalled over onto the flat of her stomach and caressed her, nuancing themselves into her gently under the sheet, across her warming skin.
This was where she belonged, she thought. Not on the stage, not on the screen, but in this small home constituted by Marcos’s hands and arms. Yet as she listened to his deepening breath after they made love, that thought was superseded by others. Wasn’t it true that she’d fallen in love with the Montoyas as a whole, their son bridging her from her old, garbled world to one intimate, ordinary in ways she’d always dreamed a family could be? And wasn’t it also the truth that the other evening, when she and Marcos saw a flick in Santa Fe, she caught herself critiquing the actors’ gestures, voicings, timing, the interplay of music and lighting? Neither was it some grand classic of world cinema—just another love story set against impending war. But every error was her mistake, every tiny triumph as if her own. She had traveled a nervy, dire road fleeing Gallup and the father she saw in Albuquerque today, to embrace a mawkish dream of dramatic make-believe. So what meant more? This real story she was living—a good story, with a promising premise and kindly dramatis personae—or some unknown fantasy drama with high potential for disillusionment and disaster?
Head aswirl, as the last fire of the season burned down to orange piñon coals, balmy and sweet smoking ash in the corner hearth of the bedroom, she whispered to him, knowing he was asleep, “I made all that up about those other guys. I never had any lover but you.”
Then she, too, fell asleep, having wrapped up the day in a ribbon of truth.
By the end of the letter, Ariel’s fingers were frozen. On a close warm moonful summer night, at that. Yet another gin, whose ice melted in the glass, stood on the wide arm of the Adirondack chair. Shouldn’t be drinking like this. Look what it’s done to Grandmother McCarthy. She took another gulp, saying aloud to the fireflies, “Stop,” though she didn’t heed her own advice, deciding instead this might be the perfect night to get stinking plastered.
No one who conceals transgressions will prosper,
that passage quoted by Kip’s friend, from the Bible—she’d heard it before. Granna, of course. Gin on the rocks and the Holy Scripture had always been her twin stalwarts, no matter how much Brice complained about having to run their gauntlet his whole life. Still, Ariel recalled how Granna’s ginny interpretations of the Bible were something to hear that first time she flew by herself out to Los Alamos for a visit. Face blossoming and eyes weepy with conviction and liquor, Brice’s mother happily clarified for her son’s receptive daughter any textual questions the young lady might have about the Pauline epistles. Lecturing away, she stared at the adobe walls of her kitchen, walls white as the clay pipe she puffed. Ariel listened amazed, then was amazed the more by the woman’s brusque switch from one subject to another in the anemic air of that mesa where she lived, having stayed on long after her only son left. From her beloved Saint Paul’s—Kiplike?—wanderings and his awful crucifixion spiked head-down to a wooden cross, to other scandalous matters such as why the devil Ariel’s parents hadn’t given her a brother or sister, Granna progressed like a grand peremptory army of one.
—Your father says he’s an atheist but you know he isn’t.
—He thinks of God in his own way.
—No offense, Ariel, but why didn’t they? Have other children, that is.
What
did
Granna see on the wall there? Ariel’d wondered. It was as if she were reading its blank page as she drew deep on her pipe and blew out a cloud that spread over its surface, like airy fingers deciphering braille.
—Maybe one of me was more than enough, the young woman said, looking at her own fingers splayed on the pearlescent kitchen table, then glancing up to marvel at the polished silver knobs of the vintage McCarthy stove. Her grandmother’s kitchen was cluttered, much like Aunt Bonnie’s—Granna had provided Brice with a sibling—with a lifetime of human accumulation. Tins of Jackson of Piccadilly tea and of Fauchon Bourbon’s Preparation Aromatisée stood behind glass in canisters sent from New York, part of her son’s annual Thanksgiving parcel. Colanders, birds’ nests, herb wreaths. Granna liked things that came from places she might never visit—such as the postcard her son had mailed from Prague—and from people she’d never see in this world again—roses, now dried and dangling upside down, had been a gift from her late husband on some long-ago birthday. Her place was full of stuff but spotless. Immaculate as the Conception, pristine as her glass of Tanqueray. A long minute passed, measured by a ticktocking clock, while Ariel watched her grandmother frown at the wall calendar. What a magnificent, eccentric woman, she thought as she waited in the densely metered quiet for what would come next.
Finally Brice’s mother said with assurance, though perhaps without clear context, —Well, as the Good Book has it,
His mercy is for those who fear Him from generation to generation.
You could have used a sister.
—Probably
—Girls need sisters so they can have someone to talk to when, you know, things happen.
—What things?
—Things that make you unhappy, her grandmother said. And then she drifted away again into other worlds, musing on the fig tree under which Adam wept, or Augustine’s lust, and how that reminded her of the hike she and Brice’s father once made up the notch at San Agustin Pass. Which was where, her granddaughter surmised, Brice was conceived.
It occurred to Ariel, sitting on this summer porch, that right now she could use, as much as some sister, a good dose of Granna’s fearsome faith. Not to mention her talent for chasing hunches in circles, like a dog its own sometimes catchable tail.
Where had Ariel’s own thoughts now veered if not into mad cyclings, like the Milky Way, which while wheeling out of control cast light on so much? Here at the farm, the kitchen walls were also white. Plaster laced with cowhair rather than the pure adobe of New Mexico, true, but she liked the idea of connection between this house and Granna’s. Anything that proposed continuity, cohesion. Ariel could see by the citronellas flame that the siding could use some fresh paint. Maybe once she got things straightened out she’d do the job herself. Scraping, sanding, brushing the rows of parallel clapboard—tasks that smacked of normalcy and healing. A project Granna would find worthy.
After another trip inside to refill her glass, she returned to the porch. With David having agreed to drive up late after work, and given the magnitude of the news she had to tell him, getting smashed was not, perhaps, the best idea. Good thing she phoned him before cracking open the liquor cabinet. “Go
away
,” she shouted, addressing not so much her predicament as the doggerel music that would not dislodge its looping track from her head. What mad genius ever thought to rhyme
lettuce
with
upset
us? Some jingle she must have heard on David’s television, since she didn’t own one, hadn’t grown up with one—a childhood abnormality that once made her weird in the eyes of telesaturated kids at school. At recess, on the paved playground, they discussed shows about cookie monsters and ranch tycoons. Smiling, she’d nod if asked, Didn’t this or that episode sound great? Probably yes, but it was a world she didn’t know, which always left her a bit the outsider. She wondered what books Kip had read. And which, if any, had sent him into rapturous joy, or plunged him into doubt. His letter was more than articulate. It seemed inspired by the eloquence of knowing loss.