Saving the World (3 page)

“I'll tell you what,” Tera offers. “I'm going to drive down and stay with you till Richard comes home. I'll give you a back rub, make you some lemongrass tea, whatever you want. I just want you to know you're not alone.”

“Oh, Tera.” Alma feels a surge of guilty love toward her dear, generous friend, whom she so readily lets slip into caricature in her head. “I'm fine. Really.” Richard will be home soon enough. It's probably best if Tera isn't here. Richard and Tera, well, they have to work at being friends. Tera's high-horse antiestablishment takes on everything offends Richard's bottom-line, heartland faith in the United States of America, the Golden Rule, and not biting the hand that feeds you. But Alma suspects that it has less to do with conflicting ideologies than with the fact that they both want to boss her around, though both are succeeding less and less these days.

“Richard doesn't have to know. I'll park on the back road. When we hear his pickup, I'll go out the back way and hike across the pasture.”

Just the thought of her baggy-panted friend hiking across the back pasture, bumping into her Paul Bunyan peeping Tom, makes Alma laugh. “Ay, Tera, what would I do without you? I'm okay, really. Just promise that if Richard and I break up …” She doesn't know what to ask Tera to do or be in that eventuality. “You'll marry me, okay?” They've played this way for years. Holding hands walking down streets. Long, passionate hugs when they part or meet. Wannabe lezzes, their gay-couple friends, Marion and Brier, call them. In fact, when Richard and Alma first starting going out and he met Tera, he assumed that at some time in the past they had been lovers.

“I don't believe in marriage, remember?” Tera reminds her. “And don't talk horseshit. You and Richard are not going to break up.”

“But if we do—”

“If you do, you move in with us. We fix up the shed as your study. We take turns cooking meals from the garden. We carpool, save on gas. We'll have a great life all together.”

It's scary the way it sounds so doable. This isn't the reassurance she needs. “Well, like you said,” Alma reminds them both, “this woman was probably just calling everyone in the phone book. Oh, Tera. I don't know why I've let this get to me. I mean I know Richard really loves me. We have a good life. I'm a lucky person.”

There's a worrisome pause. “Of course, Richard loves you,” Tera agrees. “I love you. Lots of people love you.” It sounds like Tera is conjugating a verb that has always given Alma trouble, in English and in Spanish.

A
FTER HANGING UP WITH
Tera, Alma heads for her study. She'll try to squeeze a few hours of work out of this wasted day. Will and discipline have gotten her out of old lives and bad habits before; that's what she'll try for. Keep at it, and one day she'll look up and the dark wood will be a flourishing garden, kale in November, tomatoes in mid-January.

All morning, she has taken notes, answered e-mails, called a catalog company, pretending to be her mother. The wrong size cotton briefs have been sent, and her mother has called Alma to correct the mistake. Poor Mamasita is no longer able to negotiate her way through the auto mated mazes of customer service, much less rectify mistakes when an impertinent, young voice finally answers at the other end. There went Alma's morning. Then the intruder in the back pasture, followed by the woman's weird phone call have thrown her off completely.

It will make her feel good if she succeeds in getting herself back on track. A sign that at this mature stage of life, Alma can count on inner resources. Shouldn't she have deep ones by now, on the eve of fifty? Oil fields of inner resources to tap?

The file marked
BALMIS
is still on top of her desk, pages and pages of notes from the dull, dusty tome she borrowed from the university library, using Tera's card. Francisco Xavier Balmis was no spring chicken when he embarked on his smallpox expedition from the Galician port city of La Coruña in 1803, Alma's age exactly. He had already been to the New World four times, stints at a military hospital in Mexico City as a young man. But this time his plans were to continue around the world, from Mexico to the Philippines and on to China, with his boatload of orphans, and then round Cape of Good Hope to St. Helena and home—a trip that would take almost three years to complete. His poor wife!
Josefa Mataseco, dates unavailable. Marriage, childless.
All of this Alma has learned from her e-mail correspondence with the historian in Spain who tends the Web site. There is a Web site on Balmis! A Web site on everyone.

Alma's mind wanders. What would it be like to live without Richard? It's not a new question. She has been bracing herself, ever since they lost both Richard's parents within months of each other almost two years ago now. Her own have moved to Miami, close enough to “home” to be flown back to the island easily for their last days, as they have instructed. Mamasita and Papote—sweet, slightly buffoonish names, courtesy of the grandkids—are now tottering on the edge of their graves, reaching out for Alma's hand. “I can't see anymore from my left eye. No, it's not a cataract. The doctor says there's nothing to do about it. Eat spinach. Can you imagine, I'm paying this doctor una fortuna and he tells me to eat spinach! Papote? You know how he is: Today he asked me if he had children. Yesterday he was quoting Dante. In and out. His blood pressure is up. Of course, I'm worried about his diabetes. He hasn't had a bowel movement in days. So, how are you?”

The losses that lie ahead … Alma is not looking forward to this next stage of her life. “Don't dwell on the inevitable,” Helen often counsels as she creeps around her drafty kitchen, preparing their tea, Alma's visit the day's event. But like the proverbial child told not to spill her glass of milk, that's all Alma can think about. Maybe if she had had
children, she'd throw her gaze over her shoulder, see the next generation coming up and feel heartened. Having stepsons doesn't help, though she tries to pretend that it does. David and Ben and Sam are not her babies; she never pored over their little bodies, nuzzling and grooming them; and it's that primal, animal comfort that is called for, the creature surrounded by what it has spawned. She is proud of them, her handsome, good-hearted stepsons, but she can't get over their size, their big jaws, their flushed faces when she fusses over them too much in front of their fancy New York City girlfriends.

“Nothing in the world like having children,” her mother, who never seemed to enjoy having her own, would lecture Alma over the phone during the early years of her marriage. But Alma was never swayed. Not much of her mother's advice ever worked Stateside anyway. Besides, a new husband and three young stepsons were challenge enough. By then, Alma's first novel had been published, and she was in the thick of a family fallout. The idea of generating more family was terrifying.

Cosas de la vida, cosas de la vida … You look up one day, and the adults of your childhood are gone, and the big questions you still haven't answered come flooding into your head at three o'clock in the morning. Who to turn to for answers? Alma wonders, remembering the lines in a poem she recently read and copied in her journal:

How to live—someone asked me in a letter,
someone I had wanted
to ask the same thing.

Her writing woes, though absorbing, are minor when compared with the winds of time blowing right in their faces as the windrow of parents goes down.

Losing Richard is what she has been bracing herself for. A fatal heart attack; a car accident, the body she loves strewn across the pavement like so much roadkill. For a while, after the deaths of his parents, Alma readied herself. She bought a small, spiral notebook and tailed him for days, writing down instructions on how to do all the things in
the house that Richard always took care of, mysteries to her: hooking up the generator if the electricity failed, refilling the water softener, programming the thermostats. When she asked him to teach her how to plow the driveway, Richard said, “What on earth do you want to know all this for?”

“So I can live without you,” Alma admitted grimly. Richard's eyes filled. “Oh, Alma, have a little faith.” But he went ahead and taught her to plow the driveway, though her terror of driving through drifting snow convinced her that she would probably die of a heart attack if she tried to do this herself.

After this afternoon's phone call, Richard's loss, which Alma has always imagined as tragic and terminal, is now transformed into something tawdry: betrayal and divorce. I'll kill him! she thinks, smiling in spite of herself at the irony of causing the very loss she dreads. They have already had the infidelity conversation. “I'm not Hillary Clinton,” Alma has told him. “I'm too insecure. I wouldn't like the person I'd become if I were married to a man I couldn't trust.” Richard let out a deep, convincing sigh. “When are you going to get it through your head that I adore you?”

It's probably what Francisco Balmis told Josefa on the eve of his departure. Did she believe him? Did she look over the final registry of the members of the expedition—a list the Spanish historian sent Alma via e-mail—and ask,
So what about this Isabel?
Alma's own eye was caught by this little detail. Accompanying Balmis were nine attendants, twenty-two boys, the ship's crew, and—unheard of on an expedition of this sort—a woman, Isabel Sendales y Gómez—or López Gandalla or Sendalla y López. (“Of her surname we cannot be certain,” the Web historian noted.) Not only had the rectoress of the orphanage granted Don Francisco the little boys he asked for, but she had joined his mission herself! On the darkest days, when nothing else seems to interest her, Alma finds herself thinking about this crazed, visionary man, crossing the ocean with twenty-two little boys all under the age of nine, and the mysterious rectoress about whom nothing is known for certain but her first name.

It surprises Alma—being drawn to these historical figures. She never did very well in history when she was in school. Particularly as a child, reading about a watershed episode or a battle or an important discovery made her anxious: as if she were watching a scene of impending disaster she could do nothing to change. That Portuguese captain was going to buy that first cargo of slaves and start a shameful commerce that would lead to revolts, divided families, tragic lives, civil war, the Watts riots, the murder of Malcom X, Martin Luther King, on and on—a whole juggernaut of results to be dealt with in later chapters. Alma wanted to go back and yell,
Stop! You don't know the half of what you're getting us all into, a hemisphere soaked in the blood of innocent people!

Maybe what intrigues her about the historical Balmis is that she doesn't know if she would have tried to stop him. Sure, poor orphans were used as visionary fodder, but the world was saved, sort of; massive epidemics prevented; the boys were given an opportunity to go somewhere where they could reinvent themselves and not always be bastard kids from La Casa de Expósitos. And so instead of feeling anxious or dreaming of intervening, Alma wants to go along with Isabel on the Balmis expedition.

Alma stumbled on this story as she was writing the sequel to her second novel: a multigenerational saga of a Latino family, something weighty to make up for the six-going-on-seven years since she published her last novel. Midway through part 1 (the eighteenth century), Alma realized she didn't care for these people; she was tired of their self-conscious ethnicity, their predictable conflicts. But what to do? The novel was bought! The signing advance spent. Her original editor, sweet Dorie, has been retired to an imprint focusing on memoirs by people who have worked for or are related to the famous: Lady Di's maid, Elvis's manager, William Faulkner's second cousin. A young, very hot editor has replaced her, Vanessa Von Leyden, Veevee as she is known in the book world. Alma has not met Veevee, but they have spoken twice: once, when Veevee called to introduce herself, and then when Veevee called again to introduce herself, no doubt having for
gotten to check Alma's name off her master list. Often, in glossy magazines she peruses on grocery lines or in waiting rooms, Alma sees photos of Veevee, attending literary dos, handing over prizes, looking more like a model than someone who reads, much less edits, books. Maybe publishers have to do a certain amount of schmoozing these days of dwindling readership, midlist titles spiraling down toward the bottom line, corporate owners for whom books are commodities to be marketed as if they're so many barrels of crude oil or cases of wine. Pressure is on poor Veevee, on Lavinia.

“Veevee called,” Lavinia sometimes mentions. “She wants a guesstimate.”

Guesstimate
? What is happening to the English language down in New York City? How to trust an editor who talks like this. “I can't talk about it,” Alma tells Lavinia, as if it's some Latina superstition she has to observe, a mystical circle of silencio around the writing. Finally, Lavinia has backed off. Periodically, she forwards a gushing e-mail from a young fan or a note from an editor praising Alma's work, adding:
See, you have lots of loving, devoted readers eager for the next one
, as if she, too, suspects the truth: Alma has lost faith, caving in to that old self-doubt that's gonna get her in the end unless she taps into those oil wells of faith.

Alma's disenchantment with the book-biz world has been growing over the years: the marketing strategies; the glamour shots; the prepub creation of buzz, as the publicity departments call it; the clubiness of the blurbing; and, then, the panels in which one of every flavor minority is asked to respond to some questionable theme: Coloring the Canon; The Future of the American Novel; Politics and the Postcolonial Writer. And although Alma feels that it's a far piece from what she set out to do as a writer, she has participated in it, convinced that—as Lavinia constantly reminds her—she's damn lucky to be asked.