Carry Me Like Water (14 page)

His father’s lawyer had warned him to sell the house: “If you don’t sell it, I’ll take your inheritance.” Eddie had simply switched lawyers—something the lawyer had not counted on. “I was your
father’s best friend,” he yelled. “I was his friend.” “Do you abuse your children, too?” He’d asked as he walked out the door. He didn’t know why he wanted to keep the house.

As he sat and drank his coffee in the kitchen, he stared at the morning paper. The headline read:
DROUGHT NOT OVER DESPITE RECORD RAINS
. He didn’t want to read about the weather. It suddenly occurred to him that he could go back to teaching high school—he had loved that job, and now he sat and wondered why he had left it. It wasn’t respectable—”You teach high school?” Too many people had looked at him as though he were unfit for anything else, as if he had settled for a second-rate profession. Now, he had money—and it was his. He had earned it. “But I haven’t earned it,” he mumbled. “Janitors and teachers and waitresses and farmworkers—they earn their money.” He was disgusted with himself. He was becoming like his parents—his house was even beginning to look like theirs. “I have to quit. I have to quit.” He thought of the baby and Helen. What did they want? What did they need? He looked around his house. “They sure as shit don’t need all this.” He was tired of pretending he liked this house, that he liked his job, but he had led Helen to believe he was happy—perfectly happy. What would she say if he said he wanted out—not out of the marriage, but out of this life that led to nothing. His parents had lived for comfort. He laughed to himself when he thought of how they ended their lives. He was glad he hadn’t been in the house when his mother decided to kill his father—then herself. “If I had been there, she’d have offed me, too.” He remembered the lawyer reading the will. Everything went to him—nothing for his older brother. Well, a hundred dollars. A hundred fucking dollars—and millions, millions for the younger son who had learned to make himself mute, learned to dress up for them, smile for them, be nice to them, respect them. He was nothing more than their nigger. He was their possession, their property, their houseboy. “Take the money, Eddie, you earned it. You showed your father a good time.” He still remembered the last time he’d seen his brother. He pictured him sometimes sitting at the edge of his bed looking at him with his deep serious eyes that didn’t know how to be happy. He knew his parents had sent him away because he’d beat them up. He
remembered his parents’ bruises, and he had always wished he had been strong enough to inflict wounds on them. He loved his brother even more for having fought back. He’d beat them, beat them because he had escaped from their control. When his parents had died, he had looked for his brother—but he hadn’t looked hard enough. “I should have hired a detective. I was too young and too stupid.” He laughed. “Oh, so today is beat up on Eddie day, huh? Stop it, Eddie, stop it. Take the money, Eddie.” He pushed his hair back, then pulled it with a closed fist. “Would I be such a bad man if I took the money? Would I be like my parents?” He shoved his parents away from his mind. He brought his fist down slowly on the table, then opened it. “If I find Jacob, he will save me, he will save me and Helen. We will be whole, we will all be whole.”

When Helen woke from her deep sleep, she looked at the clock and saw that it was after ten, “Oh shit,” she said. She forced herself up from the bed, and slowly made her way downstairs. She found a note from Eddie on the kitchen table:

Sorry I didn’t wake you, but you looked so peaceful. And besides, the baby needs
you
to rest. Call me after you get back from the doctor. I want to know what she has to say. Want to go to dinner tonight?

Love you, Eddie

She held his note in her hands and shook her head at his handwriting. “Such terrible handwriting. I bet you got F’s in penmanship.” She was suddenly filled with a deep sense of regret. She knew nothing of her husband’s childhood, nothing of his past. He was somebody’s flesh and bone. He was somebody’s blood. He had not created himself, had been a part of someone, a part of the world—and she knew nothing of that world, just as he knew nothing of hers. She was sorry about their stupidity, and today she had a sudden urge to know everything about him.

She stared blankly out the window. The sun was beating down on her garden, and she knew it would be a hot day. Hot days always reminded her of El Paso. Eddie didn’t know where she was born, where she had lived until she had moved to California and met
him. He didn’t even know the name she was bom with—the name she’d legally changed as if she could change herself by picking a new name. One magic day she erased Maria Elena Ramirez from the record and she became Helen Rosalie La Greca. She’d found the last name in a phone book. She invented a vague Italian family whom she had broken with. As she sat there, her legal name seemed to slide away and she felt an alliance to her birth name and her brother and her hometown—it wasn’t love exactly—just an intimacy that could not be affected by legalities. She could not banish what she had been.

Tired; she couldn’t fight the memory that popped into her mind as she looked out into her garden. Her mother was reaching for a peach that dangled from a tree. Her baby brother sat on the ground next to her. She had bruises on her face, her legs, her arms. “No era tu culpa, Mama, no eras culpable.” She did not notice she was speaking in Spanish. “What am I going to tell Eddie?” she asked herself. “What am I going to say?” She had lived this invented life for so long that she was no longer absolutely clear about her identity. If she told him the truth, would it be the truth? Or would it be just another invention posing as the facts of her past? But there was something else, something she had been refusing to acknowledge. The suppression of her self had nothing to do with her husband. She had changed her identity before she had even met him. And Eddie wouldn’t give a damn about her past, would not stop loving her because she had hidden her history from him. They had both done that, because it had been easier, because they were keeping something not from each other but from themselves. But it was no longer easier to pretend that they were not the products of a past that had formed and deformed them to a greater degree than either of them cared to put into words. They had played a game with each other, but if they didn’t stop playing soon, the game would end badly—for both of them. It wasn’t working anymore. Eddie was right. As she looked out into the morning light, she knew she could tell Eddie everything. “But, Helen, what are you going to tell yourself? How the fuck are you going to fix what you’ve done?” She shook her head in disgust as she heard herself use the word “fuck.” It was not a word she liked to use. “How will I find him?” She
whispered his name.
Diego.
His name was a people she could not run from. She wondered how the return to her brother was possible. Why wasn’t Eddie enough? Eddie wasn’t everything after all. Everything was impossible—everything was too much to ask. She remembered the last lines of the poem she had read in the bookstore:

Remember things back then
as simpler than they were.

She laughed and shook her head. She walked upstairs slowly to look for the book she had bought. She had hidden it in the bottom drawer of her desk. She had the urge to spend the day reading poems—to do something different. She opened the book and touched the letters of the poem she had read in the bookstore, “For you there are no conscious departures …” She repeated the words again and again as if she were sewing them into her skin.

She picked up the phone; her husband’s secretary greeted her in that perfect telephone voice of hers. She heard herself ask for her husband, felt the stones washing around in her stomach, then heard his voice. She tried to speak but the words were stuck in her throat. She forced out the word that was her husband’s name: “Eddie.” “Eddie,” she said, “can you take me to the doctor’s this afternoon?”

“What’s wrong, honey? Is it time?”

“Yes, Eddie, it’s time—but not for the baby.”

“What?”

“Nothing, Eddie, I just want you to take me to the doctor’s office. Then I want you to take me to the ocean and hold my hand as we walk on the beach. And then I want to tell you stories about my previous lives.”

Her husband was quiet on the other end. “Yes,” he said, but he was whispering, “I’ll be there after lunch.” She did not know what to think of the quiet in his voice. “Helen,” he said, but before he could finish his sentence, she interrupted him.

“My name isn’t Helen,” she said. She paused, and tried to control her trembling. “My name is Maria Elena—Maria Elena Ramirez.” She felt the tears roll down her face as she heard herself say her name. She had not heard it in so long that the sound of it was louder than she had imagined. It was a big name, large, heavy,
bigger than anything she had ever carried—heavier than her baby. And yet, saying it, she felt a kind of freedom as if she had just given birth.

Eddie was silent as if he were listening to her tears. “Well,” he finally said, “Helen isn’t such a long way from Elena. It wasn’t such a big lie.” He laughed into the phone. “Maria Elena,” he said, then repealed it. “Maria Elena, It’s a very beautiful name.”

She nodded, “And, Eddie, I was bom in the desert, and I was poor, and I had nothing, and I wasn’t raised in a suburb, and I’m not Italian—”

“Shhh,” he whispered, “no fair. No more letting out secrets till I get home.” His voice was soothing, and she felt calmer. “Just remember, honey, you can’t do all the talking. I have stories, too.”

“Yes,” she said, “tell me a story. Just hurry, Eddie, just hurry and come home.”

13

L
UZ’S HAND REACHED OUT
, lit the newly bought candle, and placed it on her altar. She touched the feet of each of her saints, and crossed herself. She kissed the feet of the crucifix, warm against her lips, warm from the heat of the desert that penetrated the entire house. She completed her ritual worship with a sense of duty—a sense that was, for her, a natural act. Her prayers were neither overly pious nor overly self-conscious. She prayed. It was what she did, what she had always done—even when she had denounced the European God. But she had remolded his face into something that looked like her world, like her people. She touched the silver milagro shaped like a human heart. It was hot to the touch. Everything in her small house was hot and she felt its heat deep within her. In all the years she had lived in this desert, the heat had never bothered Luz; her body was a part of it. But now that she was edging toward sixty, her body was no longer strong enough to absorb the harshness of the desert. With age, her body was divorcing itself from the land.

She smiled at the cheap reproduction of San Martin Caballero and thought of her mother who had given it to her when she had first married. San Martin, a gentleman in rich attire on a horse, was handing a fine red robe to a naked beggar. As an adolescent she had pointed at the picture and complained to her mother that the rich man should have given much more than a robe to the poor
man. He should have given him his horse—even his house. “The rich don’t give away their houses,” she had answered. “So why do we worship a rich man?” “Because he was kind—he didn’t have to give him anything.” “Kindness is not enough, Mama, The rich man has a name—but the beggar is nameless. We should be worshipping the beggar.” Her mother had not hidden her displeasure: “Who are you to criticize the saints? And if you don’t like the idea of a nameless beggar, then give him a name.” In the end, she had left the beggar nameless. She still hated that picture, and only kept it because her mother had given it to her. She had never prayed to San Martin Caballero, had never wanted a thing from him, not a robe, not a peso. She looked away from the picture and stared at her statue of San Martin de Porres. She whispered a greeting. He had became her favorite saint—aside from the Virgin. She was in love with his black skin and his perfect posture. Her mother had told her he was the son of a Spanish don and a black slave, and she often wondered about his mother’s life. Perhaps it was his mother who had been the saint, but the fact that she’d had a son
carnally conceived
disqualified her from veneration. Luz spoke to him as she often did. “Qué bueno Qué no saliste como tu papa. You’re lucky you got your mother’s blood—that’s why you’re a saint. Don’t ever forget it.” She nodded her head, kissed the tip of her fingers, and rubbed her kiss into San Martin’s feet.

She fingered the frame around the picture of her two sons. She kept the only letter the youngest had sent years ago. They were both doing well in Mexico City, both of them married and successful. She kissed the picture. “I was not a good mother—but was I so bad?” She had spent too much time trying to find another man, had left them alone too often. She spoke to the picture. “But I loved you, con todo mi corazón, les di todo.”