Living Up the Street (18 page)

So this is what it’s like, I thought as I scanned the want ads in the
Fresno Bee
, scratching out the god-awful jobs, which left mostly technical ones—dental hygienist or landscape architect—or those that rang suspiciously false: Earn money at home … I spotted, however a promising lead:

and suddenly I grew confident that things would work; that my application would be admired—the education, the teaching experience, the world travel—and passed to the higher ups who, in turn, would beam, “That’s our man!”

I called Jon Veinberg, who had been my roommate in graduate school and my best man at our wedding, and the next morning, just after eight, he came riding up on his bicycle, already sweating from the Fresno heat which had been balancing between 103 and 104 for the past few days. We had iced tea on the front porch and talked poetry: Montale and Hikmet, Transtromer and Stern.

At nine we got up stiffly from the porch, slightly reluctant about following through with our plans, and began the three-block walk down the alley (yet another landmark of this cluster of cottages) to the telephone company. When we arrived a staggered line was forming, and we linked ourselves to it, waving at a few friends we recognized, one of whom was an artist—and a very good
one! We joked about “selling out,” but secretly we were all hoping for the best.

Within fifteen minutes we were inside sitting on folding chairs and filling out a simple application. One set of questions asked: Last Job? How Many Hours per Week? I wrote T.A. in English and three hours. I smiled at this fact and shared it with Jon who chuckled behind his moustache—a great wirey moustache that nearly touched his collar bones when he was sitting down. “You lie, sucker,” he said. “You only worked two.” We laughed into each other’s faces and returned the applications to the would-be interviewer. Instead of returning to my seat I circled the room studying the equally unemployable who were dressed in faded jeans, T-shirts, mismatched leisure suits, baseball caps, pointlessly loud shoes, rubber thongs—the unemployable in long hair or cropped hair, their cigarettes rolled in the sleeves of their T-shirts. I spotted one face in particular, a Chicano I recognized from high school, and walked over to say
Orale ese!
We shook hands, raza style, and passed stories back and forth like a beach ball: Our marriages, children, cars, and misplaced friends.

I wished him luck and went to sit with Jon. He too was studying the people because his face looked defeated. He stared at me and I at him, and no words were necessary to say times were bad.

I perked up, however, when my name was called and I walked over to a middle-aged woman in a bland dress whose lacquered hair was piled into a bee hive. She asked if there was an error about the three hours. “You mean thirty hours,” she asked, pointing to my application. “No, you see, this T.A.-ship was a class in remedial English and we met only three times a week,” I explained to her. She studied my face, pencil in her mouth and said, “Oh, I see.” She wrote something on my application.

A few minutes later a business-type clapped his hands
and announced that the applications would be processed and those whose work experience fitted their needs would be called. He said we could go home, and someone among the unemployable said: “Muther, you can go home!” The business-type pretended not to hear and walked away down the hallway.

Jon and I left laughing but were at once dazed by the heat and harsh light when we opened the outside door. It was late morning and already the day left us no choice: To stay inside in front of the air conditioner to nurse iced tea and a book that we hoped would never end.

My first book came out in March and Carolyn planned a party in June. A book-selling party. Carolyn stirred up a minor invasion of colorful dishes: Fruit platter, shrimp salad, and party-time meatballs. Then there were bowls of potato chips and guacamole. A few bottles of Wente chablis were chilled for a toast and beers were iced in a tub.

We spent the day rearranging the house. We scooted the couch against the front window to face a small handsome Japanese print. We wiped the leaves of our three or four house plants, and cleaned the windows both inside and out. The bathroom was scrubbed, the floor vacuumed, and the living room scented with cut flowers from Carolyn’s mother, an amateur flower arranger.

By seven the first guests began to arrive, some in pairs and others alone, but all were awkwardly quiet at first because few had been to a book-selling party and didn’t know what to expect and because few had seen Carolyn and me in nine months—or years! Most guests were my relatives: brothers, sister, mother, aunt, uncles, cousins, and would-be cousins. Even my grandmother came with a cigarette in her shaking hand, and repeated in her gravelly voice all night: “Honey, your hair, your hair is too long!”

Then there were my literary companeros: Jon Veinberg
and Leonard Adame. I handed out beers like tickets, and they were on their way to laughter and their overblown stories.

I had also invited my former teachers, Philip Levine and Peter Everwine, and they arrived with their wives and a well-known poet who had just ended a visiting professorship at Fresno State. The well-known poet shook my hand and retreated with Levine to take up a wine glass. Later, when Leonard Adame went up to ask about his translations from the Spanish, the well-known poet didn’t feel much like talking. He answered Leonard’s questions as simply as he could and then turned away to search out Levine.

By eight the party was loudly clever with reminiscences about my childhood. My mother: “Remember when this kid used to go raking leaves and he went up to one house and asked this lady—Armenian, I think—if she had any work to do and the lady says, ‘Yes, I have to do the ironing and cook dinner,’ and this kid don’t know what to do except say ‘Oh’ and turn around and get his little butt off her porch.
M’ijo
, you crack me up.”

By his third beer, my older brother started in: “And remember when he was in kindergarten I told him that peanut butter was also shoe polish? So he buffed it into his loafers and took off to school smelling like a sandwich. Gary, I’m sorry; I had to do it. You were so stupid.”

They were stories dragged from the closet, stories that were a tradition at family gatherings, especially at Christmas when they nailed my brother to the wall, reminding him of the year he tore small holes in his Christmas presents to see what they were and later, on Christmas Eve, cried because none of them was a surprise.

I laughed along, although I tried unsuccessfully to change the subject. Carolyn finally intervened to ask if this knot of relatives would be interested in buying a copy of my book. My relatives flew to their purses and brought
out their wallets. I signed books and tried to explain the poems at which most of them would only stare. They were very proud.

It was while signing books and making up stories about how I composed each poem in a blaze of concentration that my sister Debra tugged me into the bedroom where she pointed out the window at a young woman on top of the tin shed in the back yard. The woman was cursing at a young man who was waving a steak knife at her. He cursed at her and she returned even more fierce words about his and everyone else’s mother.

They were a redneck-looking couple who lived in the apartment whose brick wall was a tall fence to our yard. A week before, while we were barbecuing with another couple, the woman’s voice lifted almost beautifully from a high window, “Charlie, this new Tide even gets the shit out of your shorts,” just as we were sitting down to eat and toast the good life.

Pulling down the shade, I felt inclined to telephone the police. I hesitated, however, and went over to tell Carolyn about what was happening outside. She rushed to the bedroom window and peeked through the shade. They were gone. Only the tin shed and the scraggly tomatoes.

My sister again tugged at my sleeve to whisper that the girl was at the front door. I scooted quickly past my guests, who were oblivious to what was going on, to answer the door. Calmly I answered, “Yes,” searching her face for a clue to her feelings. She asked if she could use the phone because her car had broken down. I stared at her openly but her eyes refused to meet mine, even when I swung the door open and showed her to the phone. I left her alone but waited not far from her wondering if I should be direct and tell her that it wasn’t a stalled car that brought her to my door but a steak knife. I didn’t want to embarrass her, but I felt she must have been crumbling inside and was in need of comfort.

But I said nothing, for fear of getting involved, and when the young woman was off the telephone I walked her to the door and—very stupidly—wished her luck in getting her car started. On the steps she half-turned to me and looking at a cockroach that had scuttled out from the porch, said, “Thanks.”

The party was a success. I sold twenty-two books and received many handshakes and loud cheers.

to Carolyn

L
ast night Ernesto, Dianne, and I sat at the dining table playing cards and drinking while Banjo went from one to another licking us. Poor dog, all day he was locked in the third bathroom because Ernesto had relatives over and, as you know, he has that nasty habit of pissing on the feet of strangers. Reluctantly, Ernesto had lured Banjo into the bathroom with a handful of dog chow. He leapt up amazingly high for such an old dog as he followed Ernesto’s open palm with its gritty treasure. He made eating noises behind the door, then scratched to be let out, whined, and barked something like, “Come on, come on”—two syllable bursts that went unheeded, although I did slip a piece of meat under the door and wiggled my fingers for him to sniff and remember me.

We played cards, drank, and later watched Johnny Carson until the electricity failed. We lit candles just to see one another. The night sky helped out now and then with blue cracks of lightning. We told jokes—or more accurately—I told jokes and Ernesto and Dianne made sounds that could be considered laughter. Eventually Dianne, flushed from wine and wobbly as a restaurant chair, excused herself and went to bed while Ernesto stayed and begged me to go on—Ernesto, the most polite person I have ever met. Such sweetness. But finally he, too, trudged off to bed and I, not quite through with the night,
went out onto the balcony to look at the roofs of other houses where I imagined laughter was breaking like the sea with every joke, funny or not.

And what did I do today? I woke very slowly with a book, had eggs and coffee, and went to work with Ernesto who wanted me to help translate some speeches of Portillo—speeches that he’s going to give at the United Nations. They were all about oil: Oil and the Third World Countries, Oil and the Coming Years, Oil’s Technological Prophecy, etc. But first we stopped off at the pharmacy near the
panaderia
, where I got an injection of penicillin. I’ve had a sore throat the last few days and have been tired. It wasn’t my idea but Ernesto’s. He’s at the pharmacy all the time—or so the woman behind the counter mentioned with a tsk tsk. She waited on a boy who couldn’t decide on Life Savers or cough drops before she waved me into the back room where I was asked to drop my pants as she searched, on tip toes, among a row of tiny boxes for the penicillin. Before she found it a customer called her away and I was left with my pants down, feeling ridiculous. She returned and searched some more among the boxes. When she found the penicillin she poked a needle into the bottle, shook it with a shiver of her wrist, and then turned to me, shooing her hand at me to bend over.
“Mas, joven! Mas, mas,”
she scolded me like a mother. I bent over until my shirt raised like a curtain, revealing my birthmark—that pirate’s patch on the left cheek—and felt the sting.

When we got to the office Ernesto greeted his workers with smiles and handshakes, introducing me as a poet and professor. They shook my hand stiffly then stepped back with nods of respect that embarrassed me. He showed me the office where we would work. It looked out on that busy street where we once shopped for shoes. Ernesto left the room and returned with a folder under his arm. He took a seat, opened the folder on the coffee table, and
began work by giving me a rough (but sometimes very accurate) translation of one of the speeches. At first we worked faithfully with the original but after awhile we got so sloppy we added words and phrases that weren’t there and crossed out pretentious quips about how the poor, the noble Mexican poor, are the promise for the future. The speeches were real; they had been delivered in small towns on the frontier or in the interior while he was campaigning for the presidency. The rumor is that the mayor of each town had the streets swept, store fronts painted, and the terribly poor run into the countryside, before Portillo stepped off the plane and rode down an avenue lined with rouged girls who flung rose petals on tip toes.

We worked for five hours before we sent out for a pizza, only to return and make up some more speeches.

The day before you left, while you were out shopping for lacquerware at the national museum, I carried Mariko the five blocks to Chapultepec Park, past that pudgy policeman who usually whispers, “Here he comes, that young Mexican with his Chinese baby.” He said it again to the hangers-on at the corner, and I smiled at him, then at Mariko, and crossed the street into the park looking for a quiet place to sit. But there wasn’t any such place. If there weren’t lovers pressed to trees, then there were kids with balloons or bright candies in their hands. If there weren’t students from the Instituto Arquitectura talking in their sing-song voices, then there were cars honking, tinny transistors, and laughter from distant rowboats.

We finally stopped at a felled tree, a relief to my arms, and I let Mariko crawl in the grass and jab ants with a stick, her drool confusing them as they raced hysterically to get out of the way. Some got away, but some just kicked their feet in her drool, utterly bewildered I suppose at what was happening to them. She played happily with a handful of grass as I thought about her, how when
we first arrived in Mexico her skin broke into a rash: Banjo nuzzled and licked her neck, and so started the rash that started the eczema that spread like fire and, I imagine, was a fire that she hoped to stop by scratching. But the eczema spread, some patches breaking with pus. You washed them daily, rubbed ointment the doctors prescribed, and still they teared like the eyes of small children. But the pain was ours, not really hers, because in a way she was like those ants—alive but not fully aware. At fourteen months she was only confused at why she hurt at her ankles, knees, elbows. Years from now she won’t remember the pain that kept her up that one night crying but wanting so badly to be happy that she clapped patty-cakes, her face smeared with tears and snot. Remember? I rocked her at the dining table as you tried to sing, coo, and clap her into happiness.