The Juliet Stories

For Christian, Clifford, Karl, and Edna,
my sibs

There is the house we all inhabit

the house which is the body and only the body

Where ghostly families in the corridors of the blood

record their odd abbreviated histories

Then there is the yellow house and the doorway and

The child standing in a pool of yellow sunlight

the bright blood shed by the sun at sunrise

— Gwendolyn MacEwen, “The Yellow House”

Somewhere between Texas and Managua, their bags go missing.

The Friesen family steps off the plane into a wall of heat. They are unencumbered by toothbrushes, diapers, and fresh underwear. They cross cracked tarmac to a flat, squat terminal and the children await their mother on gritty tile while their father sorts out visas and donates American cash to armed officials in green uniforms. They wait for hours. At last, a man named Simon, a stranger, arrives to collect them in his silver pickup, to ferry them across this new city, beneath this new sky, wavery with dust. Juliet and Keith rattle around the open truck bed like loose teeth, amazed and elated by all that’s here to be seen. Their mother, Gloria, hammers on the glass and tells them, “Get down!” Baby Emmanuel hammers too, but Bram, their father, waves expansively out of the open window. He feels as they do:
Look at this
.

The city is falling down, or already fallen. Dark green canopied vehicles, spilling with soldiers, cruise the streets. Among shacks and shanties run skinny dogs and loose pigs. Children dart towards the truck to touch Juliet’s hand, fingers scratching, papery and dry, as they cross her knuckles.

Managua smells like cooking fires, like the sultry burn of incense.

It is dusk when they arrive at Simon and Renate’s house. The gate swings shut and Renate shows them to the room in which the Friesen family will temporarily camp: Renate’s office.

Renate is a missionary from Canada, and so is her husband.

Juliet knows all about missionaries; that is what Grandma Grace and Grandpa Harold used to be. Two days ago they kissed goodbye outside Washington’s National Airport; the wind blew jagged sparks of snow into hair and eyelashes. Grandma Grace said to Gloria, her daughter, keep your purse strap wrapped around your wrist; there are bound to be pickpockets. To Juliet she said, don’t forget to say your prayers. Jesus Christ, I don’t even
have
a purse, Gloria said to Bram, laughing, as they waved through the closing glass doors and Grandpa Harold helped Grandma Grace into the front seat of his Cadillac: American built with American pride. Nobody cried, not then. The crying part was over, and the questioning, and the lectures.

Missionaries tell other people what to do.

“I’ve removed any papers of importance,” says Renate, standing in the middle of her office, “but I trust you will keep the children from touching anything.”

“We thank you for your hospitality.” Juliet’s father clasps Renate’s hand between his own, warmly. “The Roots of Justice thanks you.”

Juliet’s mother drops to the floor all that they possess: a carry-on backpack containing two paper diapers, four mini cheeses pilfered on the Washington-to-Dallas flight, a box of broken crayons, and a colouring book. In the front zippered pocket Gloria keeps a pack of gum,
in case of emergencies
. Juliet loves to imagine the type of emergency her mother might solve with a balled-up wad of pink stickiness: split pants? broken car part? severed finger?

If her family has nothing, Juliet doesn’t know it. She isn’t waiting for something better to arrive: not for the luggage, not for her father to find them a home of their own, or to begin his new job in earnest. Juliet can plop herself onto a blanket on the floor, stretch out, and — there, she’s settled.

Juliet and Keith have interrupted Renate’s nap, and with fallen palm leaves and sticks and industry, they are destroying her backyard. Renate’s face appears bisected, glaring through the black bars over her bedroom window as she opens the slats of glass she’d carefully closed to keep out the heat and the dust.

“There is a park down the street.” Renate drops each word down onto Gloria’s head. Gloria, cross-legged and silent under the window, nurses her baby and watches her children play in the blazing sun. “Go,” says Renate. “You will enjoy it.”

The yard is not a secret garden. The secret is a city unseen that sprawls outside the yard’s concrete walls, which are spiked on top with embedded glass shards but can’t keep out the tantalizing squawk of neighbouring chickens, the shouts of children and women, smoke wafting, oily from cooking fires.

“Can’t we go, oh, can’t we, can’t we?”

Gloria lifts Emmanuel off her breast and staggers to her feet. The baby lolls, heavily asleep. “Yes, let’s,” she says, drawing a circle around the four of them — their father is not here. Simon has taken him to meet someone who knows someone who is selling a motorcycle.

It is early afternoon: the worst hour to venture out. The sun stares mercilessly through leafless trees, dust rising and swept about by a rough wind off the lake below. Nor is the park at the end of the street as promised; instead, they meet a highway noisy with ox carts, and motorcycles spewing black clouds, and elderly school buses crammed to overflowing with passengers and livestock, and little Russian-made cars darting like toys.

As if falling from a great height, Gloria grabs the arm of a woman slowly picking her way along the road’s narrow shoulder. “
¿Direcciones? ¿Parque?
”

A wide plastic bowl, laden to overflowing, rests on cloth wound into a circle on top of the woman’s hair, and the bowl does not slip, even as the woman gestures vividly with her lips:
Over there, over there
. Juliet suspects magic.

“
¡Gracias, gracias!
” Gloria squeezes the woman’s hand in thanks, but to Juliet’s ears everything her mother is saying is wrong: her flat American vowels crashing against leaden American consonants, her
r
’s sodden
l
’s.

They tumble downhill. The mirage of a park shimmers and appears before them. “Ta-da!” cries Gloria, as if she’s invented it from scratch. She punctuates the moment with a dance of delight performed in her stained white dress. Juliet watches as if from a distance, as if she’s taken a step and then another and another away from her mother.

At home in Indiana, Gloria was just her mother, warming homemade soup on the stove as Juliet and her best friend, Laci, burst through the front door for lunch, or standing framed in the front window watching Juliet climb to the top of the school’s monkey bars and walk across, the only girl in grade three who dared. But here, in this strange city, Juliet glimpses the stranger Gloria could become, giddy in her jubilation, separate and apart from her children; hardly a mother at all. A novel sensation grips Juliet’s gut — shame. She is angry at herself for feeling this way, but mostly at her mother, for making her feel this way.

She can’t run fast enough away, to the stripped-down ghost of a playground, metal structures flaked to dim apparitions where Nicaraguan children climb despite jagged edges and corroded-out holes through which entire limbs might plunge. There are swings, and slides no longer slippery, and the remnants of what might have been a merry-go-round. Giant trees grow out of concrete-rimmed knolls, silver bark peeling to white skin beneath.

Juliet darts to the tip-top of a metal-barred apparatus. Something sharp rips her inner thigh, opening a gash, but she ignores it. Her knees are orange with rust, palms dusty as she swings down. Her brother Keith is sprinting towards a real train engine that sits on a concrete platform bereft of track on the far side of the park.

“Ahoy, matey, ship ahead,” he shouts, and Juliet yells after him, “That could be an island. Let’s pretend it’s an island.”

“Treasure,” Keith pants.

“Wait for me!” Gloria is hampered by baby Emmanuel’s bulk.

As she runs, Juliet sees without seeing the old men sitting idle and watching them, and the stillness of the other children, sees without seeing the scene they are making, helplessly.

Keith and Juliet straddle the engine’s nose. Juliet is riding a wild horse and Keith is surveying a jungled mountain. Both could be true.

The heat hits Juliet and Keith all at once, and they dismount and slump on a tree root the size of their father’s torso: expansive.

“What’s that on your leg?” Gloria asks Juliet.

“What, this? Oh, nothing.” The cut flames red.

“Tetanus,” mutters Gloria. But everyone’s shots are up to date. Proof is on the immunization cards, which are in the luggage, which is lost.

“I’m thirsty,” says Keith.

“Not right now,” Gloria snaps in a tone Juliet recognizes. She is mustering herself.

Before them loiters a boy. He eats ice cream out of a paper cup with a stick, licking, staring, patient, as if he has been watching them for a while. His cheekbones are broad, his eyes’ cast is green, strange wide freckles cross skin that is almost pale, and his hair is as red as Juliet’s, though tougher, textured like weeds.

“
¿Helado?
” Gloria asks, thumping hard against the final syllable of the word for ice cream, one of the few in this new language known to Juliet and Keith.

The boy is clearly thrilled to escort them to a small wooden stall on the dark and shady side of the park. Painted white, it could be any concession stand anywhere in the world. Before Gloria can give permission, the boy has ordered on their behalf. Gloria fumbles for the cloth moneybag that swings on string around her neck, dropped down inside her dress. The boy hands them each a paper cup, the dull green metallic-flavoured sweetness within already melting even as Juliet laps it up. The texture is granular on her tongue, swallowed and gone.

Around them a chorus of children is gathering, spilling out of an invisible source, drawn in this direction like filings to a powerful magnet, feet crusty with dust, clothing ripped and repaired and ripped again. Girls much smaller than Juliet carry baby brothers or sisters in their arms or on their backs, tending to them, casually responsible.

With authority, and without consultation, the boy places another order at the window. Gloria and the children watch the woman behind the counter pour the contents of a glass bottle of jewel-red pop into a small plastic bag. The woman secures the bag with a knot on top. The beverage is for Gloria, who does not want it. The boy offers the bag to Keith instead, and mimes instructions. Keith chews, spits a triangle of ripped plastic, wipes it off his lower lip with his wrist, and spills red pop down his chin, staining his only shirt.

The crowd of children cheers.

“It’s not fair,” says Juliet, feeling this deeply. “I’m the oldest.”

“This is it, Juliet. I’m out of money.” Gloria buys a second bag. No more, she tells the boy, waving her hands. The pop, called Fanta Roja, tastes like cream soda, a flavour Juliet loathes. But she knows better than to complain again; she sucks the pliant plastic breast dry.

Gloria settles on the ground, unties her shoulder strap, and smiles up at the boy who has helped them, as comfortably as if she were seated on the rag rug in their former kitchen; she doesn’t seem to notice Emmanuel’s restless head exposing her nipple. In Spanish she asks the boy, “What is your name?”

“Freddy.” The boy stands out from the others. Discreetly belching Fanta Roja fumes, Juliet can’t stop examining him: his green eyes glitter; he swaggers.

“Freddy?” Gloria repeats his name with surprise. They have not been in the country long enough to know that foreign names pronounced with a Nicaraguan accent are commonplace — Freddy, Edwin, Clifford, Millicent. Who knows what else outsiders have left behind?

“Freddy,” the boy repeats, and from behind him comes the call “
El Chelito
,” the nickname repeated gleefully. A girl with a cardboard box tied around her neck points to Juliet — “
Chelita, chelita
,” she says, like a little bird calling. The flat box sticks out like a tray on which the girl displays what she is selling: cigarettes and gum.

“What does it mean?” The children press so near that Juliet can smell their breath, see where they are missing teeth and how their hair shines, unwashed, with grease.

But Gloria doesn’t know either and is not paying attention to Juliet. Her eyes are locked on Freddy. “
¿Donde vives?
” she asks him. Where do you live?

Freddy gestures generally:
Over there
.

“Freddy.” Gloria tilts her head in appeal, says, “
Ayudanos
.” Help us.

Fear alters every angle. Juliet understands: they are lost, and Gloria has chosen this boy, Freddy, to rescue them. Noise rises, the buzz of disorientation.

Keith’s back presses Juliet’s. She would never tell him, but she is comforted by the irritating warmth of her brother’s proximity, by his sturdiness and height — as tall as she is, though she is nearly two years older. He takes after their father, as she takes after her mother; everyone says so. Between them they share the same wish: that their mother tie up her dress strap, that she cover herself, that she rise.

Puzzled and delighted, Freddy points to himself as if to say:
Me, help you?
And he bows.
But of course
.

“
Casa
,” says Gloria; she may not know the word for lost. She waves her free hand, clutching for her high school Spanish. “
Grande. Blanca. Americanos.
”

The girl with the tray wags a tiny rectangular maroon packet of gum at Juliet. She singsongs a word that Juliet does not understand.
No, no, no
, frowns Juliet, and though the girl understands, she refuses to believe, shaking the packet,
rattle, rattle, rattle
, like a handful of little stones.

The girl doesn’t know that Gloria has spent all their money on ice cream and soda pop; she doesn’t know they aren’t rich. They aren’t rich, are they? Or does the girl know better than Juliet what they are, what all of the gringos are, no matter what they think they are? The gringos have passports and American dollars; they have another country to call home. They can come, and they can go, and they do, and they will.

They make a ragged parade out of the park, a confusion of followers and pursuers led by Freddy, who dances them down different streets from those they came on, past shacks with dark interiors and dirt floors, chickens scraping in front yards, stray dogs and pigs prowling ruts of soapy garbaged water. This is the smell of a city with inadequate sewers, yet it’s a smell that will always remind Juliet of something good — something lost and something good. Because she is ten years old under an open blue sky, because there is no reason ever to arrive anywhere, because she has never felt exactly this way before — this loose in the world, this capable of escape.