The Juliet Stories (5 page)

“Mom?”

“Not right now, Juliet. I need to think.”

Juliet senses a deeply sad ending, one she feels unable to bear, yet craves. She begins weeping while there is still hope, and staunches her tears with pages of the book.

“What on earth?” says Gloria with irritation, not interest. She claps Emmanuel to her hip; she’s made her decision, and while she’s out, Juliet must be in charge of Keith.

“I’m in charge of me!” Keith yells from the bedroom, but Gloria is gone.

Juliet runs to the cupboard and stuffs the roll of bills into the plastic cup. It takes only a few seconds and she thinks,
There
, as if everything has been put right again, and for a flash it seems so. She returns to the book, picks it up, but an empty restlessness chokes her at the hollow of her neck, where she wants to swallow but cannot. The sensation unspins itself like a cape whirling around her body, envelops her; thins the words on the page, wrings from her the ability to feel.

When she’s older she’ll know the word for it:
desolation
.

She lays the book on the table, pages spread, cracking the spine.

Gloria charges back into the apartment. Confrontation has had a medicinal effect, flushing her skin with colour, thickening her hair, plumping her lips.

“Done,” she says, setting Emmanuel on the floor. She goes to the cupboard for a glass and continues, swishing open the rotted door, “The director has promised me swift action. I actually feel bilingual today. I felt like I could really and honestly speak Spanish. I wish your father had been there to see —”

In her hand is the cup with the wad of American dollar bills. She tips it and the money falls onto the counter. “But . . .” She cannot believe what she is seeing, and spreads the money flat, counts it.

“Six dollars missing . . . but . . .”

Juliet blinks.

“But I didn’t see it before? But it wasn’t there? She took it. She took it, didn’t she? She took it.”

Gloria turns to ask Juliet, but only because Juliet is there to ask, not because Gloria expects an answer.

“He’s going to fire her,” Gloria says, almost to herself.

“But then,” she says after a moment, “she did take the blouse. And the diapers.”

Emmanuel yanks on the beads hung across the bedroom door, and in his hands, in one smooth movement, they come apart. Their hanging patterns disintegrate and pour like tropical rain on the floor, each jewelled ball landing with a tinkle, a splash, rolling the tiles to the far corners of the room, under the apartment door, down the stairs, beyond.

It is the sound of calamity, and then of quiet. It is the sound of that which cannot be unsaid, or undone; and the silence afterwards, the immediacy of what seems not so terrible after all.

“Let’s go to the library,” offers Gloria.

“Now? Today?” Juliet is incredulous.

“Why not?” With her bare foot, Gloria kicks aside a scramble of beads.

After all this time, it isn’t far.

They cross one anarchic street, trudge past a low concrete wall painted with martyrs of the revolution. Hats, bandanas, fields, faces, babies, guns; primary colours. Or perhaps these are revolution’s children. Gloria isn’t certain. She reads the slogans several times but cannot promise that her translation is correct.

“There?” Juliet points to a lone square building, like a child’s block, painted bright yellow with windows all along one side.

Gloria’s body sags under Emmanuel’s weight, and Keith trails behind in silent misery. It is not far, but suddenly it seems they will never arrive. Midday heat streaks down upon them; their hair will catch fire.

They wade through a bare field with grass burnt dead from the sun.

Behind its heavy door, the library is quiet. Its shelves are half-filled; you might say, mostly empty. Juliet kneels and selects a picture book, opens it. Disappointment crests and buries her. She can’t read this book. She can’t read any of the books in this library. It is like staggering through a desert towards what looks like a pool of clean, clear water and discovering as you kneel to drink that cupped in your hands is sand, that you are washing your face in a pool of sand.

“Mom?” she whispers.

“Yes?”

“It’s in Spanish!”

Gloria huffs a small laugh; she knew it all along.

They could walk home the way they came, but Gloria is lost in the jumbled world and today she trusts no one. They cross a different field and another street, dodging cars whose drivers — men — honk and call to Gloria. She doesn’t exactly ignore them; she mutters her disgust as they escape into a neighbourhood that resembles a war zone, pitted and scarred.

It is Gloria who sees the diapers flapping from the clothesline. White, thick, triple-padded, absorbent, superior, American-made cloth diapers. She stops in the street.

“Could it be?” she asks, and in confirmation, Bianca steps out of the hole in her wall before them, holding her baby. He is peppered with pocks.

The women face each other.

Gloria doesn’t say,
My diapers
, just turns and looks at them.

Bianca does not say,
My poor sick baby
. She says, “You’re lost? Come, come. This way.”

Gloria and the children obey in dull silence. They are pallid by comparison, blanched of strength, bewildered and weary.

At the seminary gates Bianca reaches with her free hand for Gloria’s, clasps it, and Juliet sees what could be: she imagines as if it were happening Bianca removing the red blouse like a snake shedding skin, new skin beneath the old. Imagines her mother’s arm sliding into warmed silky fabric in reverse, pocks erased. She imagines her mother saying,
I was wrong
.

But instead, after a moment, Gloria lets go. She says, “
Gracias
,” and they leave Bianca and her baby outside the gates, climb the steps to their apartment. It is hot, as always. The rooms smell of an unflushed toilet and underfoot the tiles are gritty.

“Mom,” whispers Juliet. What would happen if she were to tell?

Gloria gazes at her, eyes glazed with exhaustion. “Did you find what you wanted, Juliet?”

“Mom?”

“At the library?”

Oh.

“Did you? Sweetheart?”

Juliet nods imperceptibly. Her mother is already halfway to her bedroom, through the now-exposed doorway. Nothing so terrible, nothing so terrible.

Emmanuel pops a bead in his mouth and rolls it across his tongue. When Juliet tries to dig it out with her finger, he screeches, and Gloria calls out blindly, “Whatever you’re doing, Juliet, just stop.”

Emmanuel swallows; gone.

“You can endure all kinds of things, but that’s not living,” Charlotte says to Juliet. “Living is when you’re going somewhere with someone you love.”

They are in the new guesthouse. They kneel barefoot on Charlotte’s mattress: the upper bunk of a bed in a room Charlotte shares with other Roots of Justice volunteers, though it’s just the two of them on this soft afternoon. The room is always dark, its lone window shaded by trees, ceiling low over their heads. Squat candles line the metal rails at the head and foot of the bed. Charlotte has taken time to carve out her own space in a place that is always and only a temporary home. Most Roots of Justice volunteers travel frequently; some are sent to live for a month or more in outlying villages, wherever the danger is most present, but not Charlotte. Charlotte has yet to be sent.

Charlotte holds out a candle: “Smell this.”

Juliet bends, palms sunk into the thin mattress, breathes a scent smoky and sweet, emanating not from the unburnt candle but from Charlotte herself, her hair swinging past her ribs. The bed sways.

“This is my mother’s kitchen. Vanilla. She was always baking something good,” says Charlotte. She holds out another. “Close your eyes. When you’re blind, your other senses become stronger. Patchouli. This is Mexico, and my first true love. And here’s the Jersey Shore every summer of my life except this one. Coconut oil. One more — this is spring in my grandmother’s yard. Peonies in bloom.”

Inside her mind, Juliet sees everything that Charlotte is showing her.

“Open your eyes. Your turn.”

“My turn?”

“You tell me. Where are you coming from? Where are you going?”

Conversations with Charlotte are like nothing Juliet has ever known. She would wrap them whole in scraps of fabric and store them for later examination if she knew how. To Charlotte, Juliet is a whole person who is only incidentally a child. Juliet is free to put her head back and think, to take her time, to imagine, to wait for an important thought to shake loose and float into view.

“French fries with ketchup in the back of the car. The creek overflowed and it smelled like . . . worms. Well, mud and worms. My best friend —” Juliet stops to consider. Her eyes squeeze shut the better to see Laci, as if it were the two of them sitting side by side on Laci’s bed, each holding one half of a book about unicorns, and Laci smells like, Laci smells like — “Strawberries. But not real strawberries, strawberries like a Strawberry Shortcake doll.”

Juliet waits with her eyes closed. Charlotte does not comment or judge. She does not say, “You must miss her,” because the obvious does not need saying. Nor does she remark upon Juliet’s brilliance or creativity; she does not flatter or assess. She lingers in the whorls of their shared thoughts.

“Today, this afternoon, smells like sand,” Charlotte says. “And we’re nowhere near the beach.”

“Like
frijoles.
” Juliet opens her eyes again. Maybe the guesthouse cook is making beans for supper. She adjusts her gaze to the posters thumbtacked to the wall all around Charlotte’s bed: golden women, some of them naked, coupled and melting into an embrace with a man, or alone in interior contemplation, or alone and dead, as in Juliet’s favourite: ravishing Ophelia, wreathed in flowers and floating down a river. She could fall right in, washed by waves of sweet sadness, as if she herself were cloaked in flowing white robes, her hair streaming, as if she herself were a vision of departed loveliness, pale skin and green eyes.

Juliet wants something when she looks at the pictures. She aches. She cannot name the want because it exists only in evocation. The unicorn’s horn and lifted front leg and delicate white hoof. The curve of a rainbow. Fairy wings. Heavy princess gowns. A landscape of misty forest and rolling green hills. Hair. Gauzy imaginary impossible shimmering beauty.

“Stay just like that.” Charlotte opens a small black book filled with blank pages. She says, “Your life is a canvas on which you can paint — anything, anything at all, so long as you don’t hesitate.”

But she herself hesitates, pencil hovering over empty page. “Yes,” she says, considering. “Because hesitation is not the same thing as meditation. Because doubt is not the same thing as patience. Where were you going when you ate french fries with ketchup in the back seat of the car?”

Juliet holds still, arms clasped around knees, toes pointing to the ceiling. “Sunday drive,” she says.

“Ah,” says Charlotte.

“I remember when we drove over the creek,” says Juliet. “It sounded like thunder, and the water was washing over the bridge, and we stopped and my mom was mad that we got out and looked, but my dad wouldn’t let us fall in.”

Charlotte is staring at Juliet as if Juliet were form and shape and shadow rather than girl. The bed rocks under her shifting hips; she settles herself more deeply. “Your dad has his arms around all of us,” she says.

Juliet doesn’t like this, but it sounds true enough.

“Look.” Charlotte holds out the page and Juliet sees herself, curled and floating. In the sketch, Juliet’s eyes are closed in her tilted head; her hair is much longer than her real hair and it flows around her body.

Charlotte gives Juliet the book and the pencil. “Your turn. You draw me.” She poses with her head on an angle, one shoulder dropped. “Don’t lift the pencil. Don’t look at the page. Keep your eyes on me and draw with one single line.”

I can’t, Juliet thinks, but the lone line presses onward, intertwines with itself like thread that will never be unwound. Who would want this thread unwound? It makes a sprawling-here, crammed-there heap of a picture. Part woman, part map.

“The shoreline and the sea,” says Charlotte. She rips the page from the book and tacks it low, near her pillow.

———

When it is time to go home, Juliet sprints from the Roots of Justice guesthouse to her own new house, just down the street. She never walks when she can run. Children who have gathered in a neighbour’s yard to watch a television propped in a window turn their gaze to look at Juliet instead.

Both guesthouse and Juliet’s new home lie under the shadow of a hill carved with the giant letters
FSLN
, the abbreviated name of the ruling party. But while the yard at the guesthouse is bare dirt shaded by high, heavy foliage, the yard at home is bright and sunlit, the house surrounded by palm-fronded coconut trees out front, a grove of banana varieties beside the kitchen, and spiny lime trees out the bedroom windows. The rooms in the guesthouse are crowded, but at home Juliet and her brothers can run races through the long central room and around the sunken indoor courtyard that stinks of Emmanuel’s urine. Gloria has given up trying to stop him. She lets him run naked like any Nicaraguan toddler.

Not everyone approves. The Roots of Justice office has been squeezed, for reasons of economy and convenience, into the front room of Juliet’s home. Volunteers come and go, using the Friesens’ kitchen and bathroom like their own, and some of them hold opinions about children and hygiene that run counter to Gloria’s.

Gloria doesn’t fight directly. But she has an expressive absence of smile, a twitching eyelid, a way of grabbing a passing child and thrusting him or her into the midst of a conversation like a pawn into a battle zone: “What was that you were saying about feces? This is useful information, Juliet. Something about pinworms?”

The office is for grown-ups, but Juliet knows what is there to be found: words. Every surface is littered with stacks of field notes, newsletters, clippings, purple mimeographed government forms, yellow pads of foolscap beside the telephone with messages jotted in Gloria’s looping hand. Words are like candy, if candy was free for the taking, and Juliet will read anything — signs, cereal boxes, books on any subject; she has no awareness of boundaries, no compunction about snooping, no care for the dangers of evil.

In stolen moments, Juliet reads what must be the worst of it, tracking a volunteer’s scrawl across the page. Eyewitness reports from the
campo
, of the war:

We arrived in the village of Limay several hours after the aerial bombing of its military base
.
A witness, Maria, age 12, reported that she and her sister Lucia-Ana, age 14, had gone to the base to sell pastries. They saw a strange plane in the sky that could fly forward and backward. They knew that it was the Americans and they ran. Artillery was fired. “We are killed!” Maria remembers screaming. Her sister was struck by shrapnel and died instantly, but Maria hid safely behind a low wall. Later, their father and brothers retrieved Lucia-Ana’s body parts with a shovel. A Roots of Justice volunteer returned to continue searching when it was discovered that some parts were missing.

As protection, Juliet thinks: It is happening far away from here, it is happening to people who don’t look like me. The real Nicaraguan children at school seem impervious to its happening, may not even know that it is
 
— like the foot of a body that does not know its hand has been cut wide open.

“There you are, Juliet. Keith is looking for you. Go and play and stay outside. Emmanuel’s finally down for a nap.”

Their street is paved, the yards fenced with metal bars standing in poured concrete, but behind theirs are many more streets, of pocked dirt, along which smaller houses of wood and tin crowd to the foot of the hill. Juliet and Keith follow an ox cart around the corner, stepping over patties of steaming fresh dung.

They enter a tiny
tienda
stuffed into the front room of someone’s house. Keith has enough for a packet of Chiclets, which they open and share. They examine the shelves in the middle of the room: nothing but jam. Jam is rare. Juliet picks up a jar to read the label, but the words are neither English nor Spanish: an alphabet composed of ordinary letters mixed with backwards
R
’s and
N
’s and upside-down
V
’s and too few vowels.

“Cherry?” She squints at the picture, but they don’t have enough money to buy a jar.

The store owner rocks in a chair in the corner, breastfeeding a large toddler. Tongue against the roof of her mouth — 
tst, tst, tst
 — she shoos away the children crowding the door, who have followed Juliet and Keith in expectation of some light diversion.

The silhouette of Sandino, hero of a long-ago failed revolution, is spray-painted in black on the wall beside the front door, but that won’t help them find this store again: Sandino is everywhere in this neighbourhood. He wears a hat. Fifty years ago he was killed by assassination — a peasant who demanded more for the people of Nicaragua than the dictator was willing to give, a story known to poor nations everywhere. A few with all and most with nothing. The Sandinista government is rewriting the story by taking back from those with too much and sharing it out equally: farms, land, food, education.

In this neighbourhood, everyone is a Sandinista, even Juliet and Keith. But at school it is the opposite. No one is.

Mornings mean school, afternoons mean home. Mornings make Juliet’s stomach churn and turn, as though she’s coming down with the flu, which is always, miraculously, cured by the afternoon. It is like living two disconnected lives.

But then, so much in her every day is bifurcated, split down the middle, parts separated one from the other, never touching, with only herself the link between strange, opposing, untouchable solitudes. American; Sandinista. Rich; poor. Free; constrained. Admired; scorned. Befriended; alone.

Just after six o’clock in the morning, and already the sky is bright and swarming hot. Mingled aromas of hot plastic, rusted springs, and flowering trees pervade this new season as the bus wends its way through Managua’s better neighbourhoods, collecting Nicaraguan children born into wealth, children of foreign diplomats and of U.S. embassy employees. Juliet and Keith are the only children of peace workers. (Is that even a profession?)

Despite the school’s tidy classrooms and manicured grass and swept stone pathways, Juliet cannot find her way. She is chronically, bafflingly late, searching the campus for a familiar face, disoriented, wandering, and it does not get easier over time. She gets lost on the playground. The ringing bells indicate different things at different times, and she cannot keep their meaning straight — was that the first or the second bell, and is she supposed to be in art class or at lunch? On odd days, at unexpected times, she is removed from her peers to sit with a handful of other children, most of them kindergartners — children of foreign diplomats who are also learning Spanish for the first time.

Placed into the fourth grade late in the term, Juliet will never catch up. Classes are conducted in English, which the teacher speaks with a Nicaraguan accent, but this offers Juliet no apparent advantage. She cannot remember the names of the seven seas, she confuses latitude and longitude; in desperation she checks the test of the girl sitting next to her — cheater. Sick at heart, she rips to shreds a note from the teacher and sends it fluttering out the open bus window. Keith doesn’t tell. He has a facility for languages, and no one has suggested he sit with kindergartners.

At dawn, Gloria brushes Juliet’s fine hair until it crackles with electricity and clips it behind her ears with pastel green barrettes. The barrettes arrived with an incoming delegation, in one of Grandma Grace’s regular care packages, cardboard boxes crammed with small luxuries: homemade granola, Dinky cars, underwear, Black Stallion books, even a potty chair for Emmanuel. In return, Gloria writes long letters on yellow foolscap to send back with outgoing delegations. If the children need something Gloria makes a request, though never for herself.

In the bathroom mirror at home, Juliet believes in the power of new green barrettes. But at school they render her neither less obvious nor less invisible, the impossible reality in which she’s trapped. She hovers at the rear of the classroom while the other students push through the open doorway, loose and free with laughter as they greet and compare and bump against Juliet, who might as well be furniture.