Further Out Than You Thought (23 page)

She'd been three, three or four. Her mother was on the side of the schoolyard with the other mothers, and she was taking photos, of course. But Gwen remembered it. It was one of her actual memories, she knew, because there was movement to it. She remembered holding the pale blue ribbon and walking around the pole, around and around with the other kids; they'd all worn white and walked in time to music, a flute, she thought it was. Their ribbons were pink, yellow, green, and blue.

Gwen tried to shake it off, or swallow it down, but something inside her was breaking. It was warm and runny like a soft-boiled egg. Her chest shook. She turned to Leo and let him hold her. She wiped her wet face on his shirt.

“What is it?” Leo said.

“The past. It's like it has nowhere to go. It's like that pole. We're all tied to it, we all keep walking around and around. Or else it's like the earth—the earth spinning, but also how it builds up, a layer at a time. It's what we bury. What we succeed in not thinking about, so long as we think it's gone. But it isn't gone. It's never really gone. And then it just bubbles up, like the tar pits, or like pus in a zit.”

“It's what I like best about you, Tink.”

“My zitty nature?”

“How you just spill sometimes. You bring me to life, you know.”

She extracted herself from his arms, walked closer to the edge. She looked past the school yard into the blue showing through the mist; it was pulling her toward it, somewhere she'd not been, which was also where she was going. The movement was both the mist and a propulsion inside her, of blood and oxygen and multiplying cells, a swirling to the surface of what she could keep to herself no longer. She felt woozy. Up was down, and down was up. She was afraid she might fall.

“I'm having trouble,” she said. “I'm having trouble with facts.”

“That's because they aren't real. They're a desire for irreducible truth that doesn't exist.”

She faced him.

“But the fact is, Leo, I'm pregnant.”

His face was wiped clean. A blank white canvas. He was looking through her into the field of his own bleary vision where, Gwen imagined, the fact was registering itself—a guest taking the elevator to the room with the number that matched the key in his hand. Turning the knob, opening the door, walking inside.

At last he looked at her. “You're sure?”

She nodded. She was waiting for him to struggle, to fight—for that part of him that wanted fame and freedom and the life of a bohemian to wrestle with this fact that existed for her and, now, for him. Instead, there was the instant of comprehension, and then, as if she'd cut the ribbon on some grand opening, the fiesta was in full swing and she was watching from the sidelines. Leo took her in his arms and hugged her. He spun her around and the strawberries went flying. She thought he might toss her into the air, too—but she wasn't there. She wasn't celebrating.

Why hadn't she kept her mouth shut?

“My God,” he said. “We're going to have a kid, Gwen! A family! You know what this means?”

He didn't say it—what she felt when he said
what this means.
She told herself he hadn't said it, but the moment was all wrong. It was false. A scene from someone else's life. Not hers. She was the girl with promise, the girl who could be anything. And if she belonged just to him? If she let his child grow inside her?

“It means—” Leo said.

“It means Gwen's going to get fat,” Valiant said. He sauntered out of the yellow thicket of mustard, downing his beer. How long had he been there, listening? “Jesus, kid. I thought you'd never tell him. I was dying.”

Leo set her down. “You knew?”

“Leo—” she said.

“What?”

“I had to talk to someone.”

“Can't you talk to me?”

She said nothing. There was simply nothing to say. She picked up a few of the strawberries from the dirt, brushed them off, and put them back in the basket.

Valiant wrapped an arm around her and one around Leo and folded the two of them into his chest. “There will be time for this,” he said. “Plenty of time.” He steered them down the path and toward the car. “Time for you and time for me,” he said, quoting. “How does it go, Gwendolyn?”

She sighed. What use was there in fighting the camaraderie of the moment? She picked up
The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock
at the lines she liked best. “And indeed there will be time to wonder, ‘Do I dare?' and, ‘Do I dare?' Time to turn back and descend the stair. . . . In a minute there is time for decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse.”

“Where's the peach?” Leo said. “I could've sworn there was a peach.”

“Do I dare to eat a peach? I shall wear white—something—trousers, and walk upon the beach.”

“Yes!” Leo said. “I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each.”

“I do not think that they will sing to me,” Valiant said, as if he'd known the whole poem all along.

Back in her car they flew south through the morning until the sun was high and hot, past Camp Pendleton and more Humvees with boys in camo, going the opposite direction, on their way to day three of the riots—if that's what in fact it was. Maybe the city had settled, was lying down and licking its wounds. Without a radio they didn't know and, truth be told, they didn't care. They were far from the city, further every second.

In the backseat Leo was glowing, she could feel it. Like one of those worms, the ones that spin their silk cocoons and glow as they pupate, happy in their own little world. He was singing his freedom song and he leaned forward, massaging her shoulders.

She found she liked the song less now. It wasn't a wish anymore, nor was it a reverie. Rather, it had become, in the space of a single day, a reality. How would she possibly leave?

He brushed the hair from her forehead. “You're going to be such a beautiful mother,” he said. “I can't believe it. The mother of my child. Gwen, I wouldn't have dared to dream.”

She was silent. Driving. She'd concentrate on that. Moving from lane to lane, passing the slow cars, gliding by them. There was just right now—the three, no, counting the baby inside her and Fifi, the five of them on the 5, traveling through San Diego, traveling south, to Tijuana. She crossed three lanes without hitting the brakes. It felt like dancing.

Leo and Valiant were talking about her future like they were looking in a crystal ball or reading her cards. As if they were in that clear future with her. They were talking, but what she heard was Tony, his voice in her head.
Do you even want a baby? How will you write with a baby?
And Brett.
My fiancé is a writer, a good one, but you have to starve for a while.

She bit the tip of her fingernail and tore it off. The exposed skin was tender, and she ran her tongue over it. She'd get away, soon, find a place to be alone.
Decisions and revisions.
When would she know? When would she be certain? She heard her father's voice.
What's the plan, Gwen? You have a plan, don't you?
She hated his brusque clarity, felt it as an affront to spontaneity, to creativity. But now, she wished she'd inherited a portion of it. She gripped the steering wheel tighter.

I am in control, she told herself, and breathed the affirmation in, trying to make it true.

“I want to be the godfather,” Valiant said.

“I don't think that's something you choose,” Leo said.

“Why not?”

“I think it's a fine idea. I'm not saying I don't; it's just, it's something we'll talk about. Right, Gwen.”

Right, Gwen.
It was a statement, not a question.

She said nothing and no one noticed.

AT THE BORDER the van beside them, in bold red lettering, said
S AND M ELECTRIC—WE MAKE YOU S-M-ILE!
“No. Not really,” the Count said, and he snapped a photo.

Mexico waved them right in.

They rolled the car windows up. She felt the sweat bead at her temples and slip down her jaw. The heat shimmered off the sidewalk and she saw the town through the waves of hot air as if it were in another dimension from the three of them, sealed in the silver Nissan, as if the people on the streets moved through a substance thicker than mere air and were subject to the push and pull of its tides.

The children with bare feet, their clothes torn and dirty, held cartons of gum in their hands. When the light turned red, they surrounded the car, knocked on the windows. “Wanna buy a Chiclet? Hey, rich American, got a dollar?” More kids washed their windows with rags, filthy soapy water and squeegees. Leo opened Gwen's purse and cranked the window halfway down. He took out her crocheted change purse and handed the children all the dollars folded inside. It wasn't much. Twenty bucks or so, but it was blood at a feeding frenzy. More kids came, and men with sunken cheeks and thin arms—one missing a leg—women with children on their backs, their hands thrust toward the windows.

“Para mis niños,”
the woman at Gwen's window said. Her lips were cracked, her dark eyes fixed on her through the glass.

Leo rolled his window up.

“Zero the savior.” Valiant leaned in, breathing on her, slurring his words. “You know he's never going to have any money, don't you, kid.”

“You mean
I'm
not,” she said. “It was my money.” She didn't tell him it didn't matter—she had the wad of cash in her front pocket. She reached in and touched it, made sure it was there. It was one of the things she liked best about stripping. The fact of the cash, the untraceable green.

She put her foot on the gas. Barely. Then the brake. They moved through the masses, parted them and rolled on to where the people in the dirt lots beside the dirt road were selling plaster statues—Virgin Mary and Saint Francis and Jesus himself painted in pastels—pinks and greens and blues.

“Mary,” Valiant said, unlocking his door. “Mary! Stop!”

Gwen was pulling to the side of the road when he opened the door and was out of the car, running, his hands flapping behind him. He returned with a two-foot Virgin Mary in his arms. “My whole life I've wanted a virgin,” he said, and he held her in his lap. He leaned his forehead on hers and touched her face with his fingertips, her lowered eyes, her lips. Gwen was trying not to look, not to laugh.

“Please,” he said. “Might we have a little privacy?” And he pulled his leather jacket over their heads—his and Mary's.

They drove the narrow, crowded streets, past a woman with a cart selling fresh cold fruit on a stick—watermelon, pineapple, banana, and mango—past the sombrero shop with the giant, ridiculous sombreros for the gringos, and alongside the meat market with the skinned cows and pigs, with the plucked chickens hanging in the warm open air, with the swarm of flies. The traffic was thick and slow and, though their windows were sealed, the smell of the raw unrefrigerated meat, the smell of death, seeped in; she could taste it in the back of her throat and it made her gag. She coughed, put her nose in her armpit to drown out the smell. She liked her own smell, as a rule, but now she liked it even more. Her smell had changed, she was sweeter. She smelled, a little, of—was it citrus blossoms?

Skinny dogs walked the sidewalks, lay in gutters in the sun. “See, Fifi,” said Leo, holding her up to the window. “It's another world here. In Mexico, it really is a dog's life.”

“Sure,” Gwen said. “If you don't mind life on the street, scrounging for food and water.”

“A life of freedom. Look around. You don't see a single leash.”

American college boys walked out of a cave of a bar. Their arms around each other's shoulders, they were singing. She had come here once, during her college days, her college daze, come with a few girls and a few guys—sorority sisters and frat boys, she wouldn't call them friends—come for those endless shots of tequila, for the Coronas and the cheap margaritas in goblets the size of soup bowls. Who had she been then? It felt like a dream, like she was remembering some character she had played. It wasn't her. It had never been her. She'd played happy-go-lucky. She'd played the ruddy, round-cheeked sorority girl, pasted smiles on smiles. A convincing actress, she had fooled even herself. She'd thought it so easy to forget who she was, to be like everyone else. She remembered puking in a bathroom, happy to have made it to a toilet. And the sun—she remembered how bright it was when they'd swaggered back into the day, how bald the town had looked, the way it did now.

The day was bleached and shadowless, unrelenting as a migraine—the kind of headache her mother used to get, occasionally, and her grandmother more often, a headache that could last for days. Lotta had said once it was her body's attempt to forget, to white it all out. She wouldn't talk about what. Gwen's mother had told her it was Carlotta's youth—the thing she wanted to obliterate—something that had happened growing up in that shack in Globe, Arizona. Carlotta had been the oldest, and her mother just kept having children, a dozen in all—more diapers for Carlotta to change, more tortillas for her to make. Gwen remembered her saying she'd learned to hold a book in one hand, flip tortillas with the other. But she wouldn't talk about the extended family, the uncles and the stepfather, the big, crowded family bed. It was her secret past, what Gwen would never know. But she felt it inside her, in her blood, like a fever; it warmed her skin, quickened her pulse, and made her needful. Her life would be the proof—the proof it was worth it. There was a reason she was here, a reason Carlotta had persisted.

She touched the smooth, oval pendant, rubbed it like a worry stone, or like a tiny bottle with a genie in it. As if the Virgin herself would appear. The Virgin of Guadalupe, protectress of women and children.