Hard Red Spring (50 page)

The taxi swerved around the impromptu celebration. Pushed against her daughter in the backseat, Jean felt the rush, the fear. It was not the degradation, the desperation, and the casual violence playing outside that seemed so foreign to Jean. It was the touch of her daughter that thrilled and terrified her. Maya held her mother's arm as the taxi driver plowed through one stop sign, then another. Each with the blue hand painted over the face, making its bizarre yet intimate signal to Jean, like a greeting between members of a secret society.

This was Guatemala, the horrific country from which Maya had arrived, fourteen years before, in the Los Angeles Airport, with a sickly wail, a long scar across the top of her skull, and a diaper that had not been changed in a day.

~~~~~

The past several months with Maya had been a nightmare. Jean hated to use such a dramatic word, but it was always the word that came to mind, before she corrected herself: challenge, struggle, even the more biblical trial. When she did hint at problems to other parents, they nodded knowingly. Hormones, independence. But no, this was nothing like that. Maya's anger was needy and, it seemed, plotted for the greatest effect.

Jean remembered something her mother had said on their last visit to Iowa, about how children are always convinced of the atrocities of their parents. It was a fact of parenting. But, of course, she had not put it as eloquently as that. “You and me,” she had said to Jean cheerfully, while stuffing clothes into the washing machine, “will always be monsters.” And not even by becoming parents themselves, and being accused, did children ever change their minds, her mother said, giving her a meaningful look.

But Jean was innocent, of this she remained sure. At that time, she could not imagine what Maya could ever accuse her of.

One day this past winter, Jean was making breakfast before taking Maya to school. For some reason that morning, Maya crowded Jean in the kitchen, staying close like a toddler. Jean sliced banana into her own cereal, making lunches and coffee all at once. She stepped to the left, toward the refrigerator, and accidentally bumped into Maya, eating her own cereal right behind
her. It was not a hard collision, but enough of one to set Maya back one step, and to send a large splash of soy milk over the lip of her cereal bowl.

Maya screamed and then fell over, sending her cereal in the air and her bowl smashing on the ceramic tiles.

“Don't push me!” she had cried from the floor, her palms pressed in the milk, in the porcelain shards. “You're hurting me!”

Jean had been so shocked that she rushed over to help her up, but that sent Maya nearer the edge of hysteria. She scuttled across the tiles like a crab. “Get away from me! You big dyke, get away!”

The scene that ensued was so baffling and violent, of a girl beating herself on her chest and accusing her mother of the worst abuse, that Jean felt under attack.
You big dyke.
She had backed up against the fridge and watched as Maya's beautiful face darkened into startling shades. She writhed on the kitchen floor like a toddler, anger with eddies of insecurity and neediness showing at the margins. She swore like an adult, kicked like a child. Then, before Jean had soaked up the cold mess with paper towels, Maya stood up and got ready for school.

They rode in the car together thirty minutes later in absolute silence. Jean focused her eyes on the road unraveling unpredictably before them, the road she drove every day. She braked and realized she had no idea of the speed limits of her own neighborhood. When the cop pulled her over less than a block from the school, Jean and Maya waited in silence. Cars passed, familiar faces giving Jean expressions of disbelief as if at their suddenly divergent, tragic lives. Maya slid down into her seat.

“I'm sorry,” Jean told the cop through her open window. “Was I speeding?” Her heart pounded like she had been speeding.

The cop's sunglasses were huge and unnecessary.

“I guess I just wasn't paying enough attention. I'm just so used to these roads—”

“Is that your daughter, ma'am?” he asked, cutting her off.

“Yes.”

He watched them, registered Maya wilted in her seat. Jean could see Maya's reflection in his glasses, could see what he saw. “Miss . . .” he said more gently, “miss, is this your mother?”

Jean turned to look at her daughter and watched her hesitate, considering something, before finally saying, “Yes.”

“I'm sorry, I don't understand why you've pulled me over.” Jean's voice cracked. Don't cry. “Was I speeding?” She must speed through this area on
a daily basis, always five minutes late dropping Maya off. Jean felt herself losing control for no good reason. Was she speeding? Was she crying?

“No,” the cop relented. He placed his hands on his hips and gazed out over the schoolyard. “You were going too slow. Going too slow in a school zone is suspicious.”

“Suspicious?”

“Yes, it's worse than going too fast nowadays. I have to pull over anyone going too slow.”

Fucking cops, Jean thought, so unimaginative, always pulling over the wrong people. She hated him for adding to her distress that morning. Moments before, she had imagined her own arrest. Reckless endangerment of a minor, drunk driving. Was she still drunk? She had opened and finished an entire bottle of wine by herself last night, because she did not have anyone to share the bottle with. Maybe that was why the morning had been so surreal. She was still drunk. And she could not decide which was worse, drunk-driving her daughter to school or that scene in the kitchen.

Jean passed the rest of the day in stunned silence in her office, wondering what could have happened. She replayed the scene obsessively in her head, wanting to find real fault in herself. Possibly she had bumped Maya too hard. But she could not forget the long pause, the single splash of milk, the settling of the bowl's contents, which she had clearly seen (more than she'd seen Maya), before the whole thing went flying into the air.

And her hesitation with the cop. What had Maya been thinking, right before admitting the identity of her mother? Had she been considering denial? Of repeating her kitchen performance and watching the cop drag her mother away? The look that flickered on her daughter's face was one she had never seen on Maya before, though she recognized it for what it was. Temptation.

By the end of the day, Jean deemed the whole scene a hormone-induced fluke. Maya was pubescent, Jean was menopausal. And indeed, when Maya returned from school the equilibrium seemed to have righted itself. Jean even apologized and Maya accepted. Maybe they had both momentarily lost their reason. But then it happened again a few days later. Jean had reached out to gently guide Maya through a crowd in the mall, and she had screamed and fallen. The shoppers parted, a sea of accusation.

It went on and on, to the point that Jean feared what her neighbors would think. She expected the police to come to the house; she dreamed repeatedly of being interviewed by child services.

“I'm a liberal,” she'd insist. “I've never even spanked her.” The
policeman interrogating her never believed her, always had sunglasses on. He confronted her with pictures of Maya's naked body: bruises and cuts and indecent poses on Polaroids.

“She did all that to herself,” she'd say. But it didn't even seem believable to her.

“Who took these pictures?” she'd demand. “Who's taking pictures like this of my daughter?”

“You took the pictures,” the policeman would tell her. “We found them in your house, in frames.”

Sometimes, in the dream, she'd confess.

During Maya's first therapy session, Jean sat in the waiting room for an hour before her daughter came out and said the therapist wanted to speak to her. The therapist—a young, sincere woman—had come highly recommended by a coworker. But Jean noticed right away that she was not nearly old enough to have a teenager. She looked and dressed closer to Maya's age than Jean's.

“I know you're eager to get to the heart of the matter, and so we'll just start with that,” the therapist said as Jean settled in, feeling Maya's warmth in the upholstery. “Your daughter seems to think you're racist.”

“Excuse me?” She thought she had said “racist.”

“She believes that you saddle her with different expectations because of her race.”

Jean felt the whole room tipping beneath her. “Where the hell is she getting that? How can she call me a racist? I give to the NAACP! Where the
fuck
are
you
—”

“Please. Ms. Roseneath. I didn't call you that. I don't think you're racist and I told her so. A very confused little girl with a very unique background thinks this, and it's my job to facilitate communication between you. Now.” She consulted her notes. Pages and pages of notes, all Jean's failures, right there in writing. “She mentioned an incident a few months ago and I think it serves as a good example of what makes her believe this. She told me that when she did something wrong, you told her that”—she skimmed down, locating and then quoting—“Latin American immigrants have it hard enough and that she shouldn't give them a bad name with her bad behavior.”

“She was shoplifting!”

“Yes. You mentioned that before.”

“Well, did she mention she had stolen shoes when I said that? A pair of two-hundred-dollar high heels!”

“Yes. And when you refused to buy her the shoes weeks before and she said she'd ‘die' if she didn't get them, you scolded her for her language and reminded her of Guatemala's civil war. Of all the innocent people who died every day, who didn't even have shoes.”

Jean had known the session would turn out like this. Maya, with her long-lipped, oppressed expression, her large, liquid black eyes, could wring anyone's heart dry. She knew, the moment she submitted her daughter to therapy, the blame would shift onto her. But still, she took her, because the woman made Maya feel better, and really, that was the point. To settle her tantrums and give her an outlet, even if that outlet turned out to be blaming her mother for everything. Yes, the therapist concluded, the problem
was
her. Not Maya's vapid friends or the degraded moral framework of a life spent at the mall, those were not causing her daughter to lash out, frustrated and unfulfilled in life. Because this was what Jean believed. No. The problem was eight million unlucky, faceless Guatemalans, thousands of miles away, cramping her style. Jean should not mention them anymore.

“But that's her heritage. You're telling me we need to completely forget where she came from?”

“I'm saying she needs to understand her past in a different way. She doesn't understand Guatemala beyond the struggling population here in Los Angeles and what you've told her about the war. It's not a source of pride for her, it's punishment.”

“You think she needs to see Guatemala? Do you think she's old enough?”

“She's definitely old enough for a Roots Tour. I know many children her age benefit from them, although I don't think Guatemala's the best place to travel at the moment. For children from more dangerous places, I usually suggest that the parents take a class, to learn more and share more positive information about the culture with their children, in informal ways. Kids usually see a class as punishment, but many parents enjoy the challenge. If they have the money and time. I know you're a single mother.”

“I love taking classes.” Jean straightened. “I have two graduate degrees.”

Jean negotiated a fragile peace with Maya. She did not touch her, did not criticize her for her dull friends or her grades, she did not mention Guatemalans in general, and she found a Twentieth Century Guatemalan History class at a nearby university. She even paid for cable. When she cooked in the kitchen, she allowed Maya to watch terrible things: sexist music videos, sitcoms that reinforced gender roles. There had been only one incident over the
summer. It had been the worst, but it had also been the last. Jean believed this to be progress. She even became convinced that she was not to blame for whatever psychological trauma caused these tantrums. For after two months of peace, they had started up again soon after a visit to Jean's parents' house in Iowa. Right after Maya's first visit to a church.

~~~~~

On the four-hour trip in the garishly painted, corroded school bus to Xela, marimba music blared, getting louder as civilization drained away. Airplanes replaced with cars, replaced with carts, then donkeys, replaced by the hunched figures of humans hauling their belongings on their own backs.

The bus driver looked about as old as Maya. He'd covered the windshield with so many Catholic stickers and sexy magazine pictures that he often had to put his head out the window to see something clearly. His business partner, an even younger itchy boy with a light crust about his eyes, squeezed through the crowd, collecting the fares and selling Chiclets.

A storm, which they never saw, had preceded them on the dirt road. The bus tires stamped the smooth, new mud with long, wavering scars. Maya hunkered down with one of her fashion magazines, while Jean stayed vigilant with her sunglasses up and her back straight despite the busted seat springs. Below, over the ambiguous, slick edge of the road, a river ran orange and thick with clay.

“Boy, I'm ready for the hotel pool, Maya. How about you?” The promise of a pool, a shopping district, and frozen fruit drinks had inspired some excitement from Maya in the past few weeks. Anything that made Guatemala sound like California.

“Does it have a diving board?” she asked skeptically.

“I'm sure it does.”

Maya flipped pages, her ring flashing. “Mom, that was your friend Telema, wasn't it, at the airport?”

Jean grabbed the seat in front of them, feeling the tires slip. “Yes.” Maya and Telema had never met, though they knew about each other. Jean had purposefully kept them apart. The fact that Maya had used the term friend suggested she knew more than Jean wanted her to know. She didn't call Jean's real friends friends at all, she just used their names. “How did you know it was her?”