University of Northern Iowa
ShelterAuthor(s): BETH ALVARADOSource: The North American Review, Vol. 295, No. 4 (FALL 2010), pp. 33-38Published by: University of Northern IowaStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/23055044 .
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NAR
Shelter BETH ALVARADO
Dina was the first child to come to
the shelter. Fifteen, long brown hair
hanging straight down her back, black
eyeliner circling her eyes, she had been
trying not to cry for hours, ever since
her foster mother had announced no
more: no more mud tracked across
white carpeting, no more money stolen
from the bowl in the kitchen, no more
valium missing from the cabinet. Dina and I were sitting on the low rock wall,
waiting for the foster mother to finish
intake with the counselors. We were
waiting for her to leave. I was holding my eighteen-month-old son on my
lap. Dina was staring at her feet. We
were not talking. The foster mother
seemed upset. She doesn't want to
leave you here, I thought to say, but
how would that observation help Dina? So I said nothing.
It was about three feet high, the rock
wall, of black volcanic stone, built in the Depression by the Works Progress
Administration. At one time, this had been a genteel part of Tucson. Just west
of the university, it was an older neigh
borhood, the black stone walls squat
ting in front of the Victorians and California bungalows, but by the 1960s, the neighborhood started slipping
towards seedy. Bars and head-shops
opened in some of the old houses;
hippies and homeless children started
wandering the streets, panhandling from tourists and setting up camp in
the park. By 1976, when the shelter
opened, gentrification had begun:
vintage clothing and used bookstores,
vegetarian and ethnic restaurants,
jewelry and pottery shops. You could
get the future divined via the tarot or the palm of your hand. Young families started moving in. Geraniums, wicker
furniture, and wrought iron sculptures
sprouted on the large front porches.
The smell of roasted garlic joined the
patchouli and marijuana smoke
wafting through the air.
Imagine the first day we saw the
house, the five of us standing there on
the walk. Two men, three women, all of
us in our early to late twenties: the
youngest, 22, is me, toddler balanced
on my right hip. The man next to me
is Fernando, my husband. We have
signed on, in the August heat, 104
degrees easy, to be house-parents for
$6000 a year. The shelter is a revolving
door, a temporary stop for runaways and other lost children, thrown-away children. We will shelter five at a time;
they can each stay for a maximum of
30 days. The director, an ex-nun, and
the two counselors will be on hand
during the day, but the nights are all ours. Maybe I think working here is a
way of giving back. Maybe I have this idea that I can be noble, but what it
means, really, is that as house-parents,
we get room and board, we can take
classes, our son can stay at work with
me, we'll be able to save money. We
are qualified because we are ex
junkies, something that, even at the
time, seemed laughable. Oh, we've also
been through training at Juvenile Court so we are certified, someone has
certified us, although in my heart I
don't feel certified. The first time a kid calls me Ma'am, I look to the right of
me as if I expect to see a grown-up
standing there.
The house, a large California
bungalow, was built around the turn of
the nineteenth century. Two stories, it
had a wide green roof, attic windows,
and a deep front porch with stone
pillars. On this particular August after
noon, from where we stand on the
front walk, we can smell something
ripe, something dead. Inside, we find
clogged toilets, closets fouled by tran
sients, burned campfire circles in the
carpets. Upstairs, a black dog, its belly bloated, legs stiff. Rigor mortis has set
in. The house must be cleaned, soiled
green carpeting stripped from the
floors, floors sanded and sealed, nearly a century of wallpaper scraped from
the walls, walls painted white, ceilings pale blue with donated paint. Kathy, the ex-nun, declares that it will be the
perfect bonding experience. We will
emerge from this cleaning and renova
tion, a team. And we do.
Dina was our first. Her father white,
her mother Mexican—what was the
story? Too much alcohol, maybe drugs.
Maybe jail. The old litany. Before the foster mother, Dina had lived with her mother and her nana downtown in a
crumbling row house built in the 1800s. Late at night, someone would
tap on the window and the mother
would disappear for weeks and then
Dina would disappear from school or
show up late, tired, stoned, smelling of
cheap wine. Oh, oh, they said, the nana is too old. She's been seriously ill. Look at her, her long white braid, knotted
legs, feet shuffling in slippers. Dina is
asking for help. That's what acting out
is, the counselors tell us, a cry for help.
Tiny and dark skinned, black eyes, her mother deported back to El
Salvador, Veronica was next. She lived
with an old couple she called Nana
and Tata in a small white house in the
roughest part of town. A worker from
Juvie dropped her off. Domestic
violence. She had been accused of
hitting the old lady, of threats. Veronica carried a sock full of change
so she could make phone calls, one
after another from the pay phone at
the back of the house. To her
boyfriend, Dina whispered. He's old. Has a car. Es un negro. He wants her to
run away again. To meet him at the
Spanish Well. The Spanish Well? A bar down on 6th Avenue. Where the
hookers hang out.
My memories of this time are, of
course, spotty. At least one hundred
kids came through those doors and I
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remember these first ones more clearly,
these first ones before everything
began to blur. Kenny, for instance, a
handsome kid with dark curly hair and a big grin. Is he the one who starts
calling our Miguelito, Michael?
Michael, Michael Motorcycle. Trish, blonde bangs falling in her eyes. She's the one who won't bathe, has been on
the road for weeks, hitching rides with truckers. She smells, keeps her hair in
her eyes, and no, she fucking is not
interested in talking about it, thank
you. Body odor has become her first
line of defense. Paul, the red head, cut
his father down when he found him
hanging in the basement. Paul, on
suicide watch, does not want to go to a
boys' home in Phoenix. Kenny, too, is
there for protection. His life has been
threatened. Why don't they call the
police?
Don't ask any questions. Wake up the
kids. Make breakfast. Throw the windows and doors open, put on the
radio, Peter Frampton, Aerosmith,
Lynyrd Skynyrd. Help the kids with chores. Sweep, mop, wipe down coun
ters. Bathrooms. No one wants to clean
bathrooms. Watch the baby, oh the
girls all love to watch baby Michael and he loves the girls. Wash the clothes
in the washer out back. Hang every
thing on the line. Watch it so the tran
sients don't steal anything. They are
that quick. Morning group. Try not to
be the ambulance rescuing everyone.
Woo-ooo, woo-ooo, woo-ooo, Louis,
the counselor says, here comes the
ambulance. Make lunch. Go to the Y.
Swim. Play basketball. Put Michael down for a nap. Afternoon group. Do
the grocery shopping. Make dinner.
Play pool on the donated pool table.
Watch TV? Okay, for one hour. When the hot water heater goes out, heat big
pans of water on the stove for dishes
and baths. When it's cold, make a fire in the fireplace and roast marshmal
lows. Tell ghost stories. Set traps for
the mice. Bed checks. Answer the door
at midnight. Do intake.
When the children come, they are
sullen, they are angry. Their hearts are
crying: I don't get it. Why me? Why am I the—oh, just fill in the blank
although it doesn't appear on any intake form—the rejected one, the
betrayed, the abandoned, the raped, the
bruised, the fucked up, the worthless,
the loser, the stupid idiot, the ugly one, the one no one will listen to, the one
no one wants or loves or cares about...
Actually, they never ask. Their hearts
aren't crying. They're in a state of
cosmic shock, chronic numbness.
Their outrage is on hold. You mean
things could have been different? Life isn't like this for everyone? They sit on the couch. Middle of the night, middle of the day, doesn't matter. They are like
cats, still inside, watching, eyes tracking everything that moves,
muscles tensed, tails twitching. It's a
matter of survival. It's dangerous to get
attached, to open up, to confide.
Everyone must first be measured.
Everyone is found lacking.
Michael, who isn't a baby any longer but is not yet two, is still the center of
his own world. He has fat moon cheeks
and dark eyes and soft feathery hair.
He runs around with his hands tucked
into the bib of his OshKosh B'Gosh! overalls. He hoots. He knows exactly 32 words. He is never afraid. He will throw the ball to anyone. Stop right in
front of them, lean back from the
waist, the way that toddlers do, big plastic ball between his outstretched arms, and shout before shoving it
through the air. He is the only one who can be trusted.
On the night Veronica runs, the
house is blazing with lights from every window. Anyone passing by would see,
so clearly, there has been, is, an emer
gency. Fernando, Kenny, Paul and Trish
set out on foot, their long legs
stretching, their voices calling. Up and down the streets, over to the park where the street people hang out, up and down the dark side streets and
alleys. Dina and I can hear them. We
are sitting on the back porch with
Michael, our toes in the powdery dust,
we are waiting in case Veronica comes
home. Then we decide to walk along Fourth Ave., past the bars and closed
shops, down to the Dairy Queen
where, Dina tells me now, sobbing, half
an hour too late, Veronica was
supposed to meet el negro.
Dina carries Michael in her arms. We are both barefoot, wearing, prob
ably, shorts and tank tops, our long hair hanging down our backs. Dina's
mascara smeared below her eyes.
Maybe we both look like junkies, like
runaways. I feel something close to
love, a tenderness for her, but how can
I tell you who she is? She has to be a
character for you to remember her.
What quirky things does she say? Does she tilt her head before speaking? Are her eyes a special shade of brown? Is
her patience with Michael endearing? Does her weakness for getting high
engender sympathy? But maybe she
has been too marked by abandonment
to be anything but timid. She will
disappear and allow me to project on
to her, blank canvas that she is at
fifteen, any characteristics I want. She
is as willing as a puppy to do anything for love.
Sammy loves the cockatiel. It flew in
the open window, landed on his
shoulder, its white wings opening and
settling, opening and settling. Sammy plays pool with the bird perched next to his ear where his dark hair curls. He's fourteen and likes women, likes to
pinch a pretty girl on the butt, likes to show us how he can disco. He pulls a
creased photo from his wallet, there he
is, a skinny Puerto Rican kid standing with his arm around a plump white
woman. She sure be ugly, Paul says. What you be, a red-haired nigger? Sammy says, kiss my ass. Every time.
Trish puts on eye shadow for Kenny.
Leaning forward over the sink, trying not to squint as the cigarette smoke
floats up between her and her image in
the mirror, she smoothes the powder over her eyelid with her forefinger. Eye
shadow, bright blue, sometimes teal,
then, midnight blue mascara. Mascara
in Spanish means mask, I tell her, mas
cara, more face. Just because you don't
wear any, she says.
Later, she leans back against the pool
table, a seductress from an old after
noon movie. How would I make this
shot, she asks Kenny, tilting her head so her bangs fall away from her eyes.
Kenny, our little dope pusher, says, bat
those baby blues. Is this how you hold the stick, she asks. I can show her how
to hold the stick, Sammy says, elbowing Paul. His left eye wanders. His cockatiel has flown away. He is lonely.
The pool table takes up all the space in the room with the fireplace. Perhaps it used to be the parlor, perhaps a baby
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grand stood next to the front window so
you could look at the mountains and
trees, at people passing on the sidewalk,
while you played. Now you have to be
careful when you make a side shot that
the back of the cue doesn't go through
the side window, the window that looks
out on the desert elm and the apart
ment next door. All night, shadowy
figures go in and out of that apartment.
They could be selling drugs or offering sanctuary. We aren't sure. One night a
man with one leg, his other cut off at
the hip, was running from the street to
the apartment, leaping on the one leg, it
stretched out and he landed, it stretched
out again, he landed, like an image from
a dream or a movie. Kenny saw him,
too, this look on his face like wonder.
Kenny, here for protection because one
night during a drug deal gone bad, he
saw them throw a blanket over this guy's
head and then shoot him.
Kenny begins thumping the floor
with the cue stick whenever Trish is
shooting, drapes his arm over Dina's
shoulders, whispers to her. Check it
out, he says, studying the look on
Trish's face. Is she jealous? Can he read
her? Sammy fiddles with the radio,
Frampton, Boz Scaggs, salsa, static,
starts talking about how he dances, like
this, and grabs Trish. She pulls away. He rubs up against Dina's butt while
she's leaning over to make a shot.
In the kitchen, I tell him. Now. You
can't go around touching the girls like
that.
One eye wanders to the left as if his
attention is divided. He runs up the
stairs, climbs out the window and sits
on the roof, on the steepest part of the
roof. He is smoking, looking out over
Fourth Avenue, the trees and shops
and street people. He flicks his ciga
rette out in a red arc.
Sammy was kicked out of the last
group home for molesting a younger
child. (Is this something I didn't
consider? Putting my own child in
danger?) Louis, the counselor, leans
back in his chair, and clucks his tongue
against his partial plate. That's DES for
you. Just dropped him off. Tires
smoking. He makes a cuckoo sign with
his finger and grins. Sammy's a quart
low, he says.
DES, CPS, the police, all those
government agencies. If they couldn't
drop them here, where would they take
them? Juvie. Lock-up. Detention. But
sometimes, I think, maybe that's where
they should take them.
A quart low. Two quarts low.
Running on empty. Screws loose.
That's how we talk. Christine, the
other counselor, says humor is a form
of self-defense. Watch out for trans
ference. You don't want to get
attached.
I won't get attached, this is what I
tell myself, and this is why. There are a
few things that always seem true about
me. One, in moments of crisis, I never
break down. At times when others
might be emotional, I swallow. I
choose not to feel but to observe. I
tamp things down. The other is my
ability to give myself over to fantasy, to
love the fictions, the details of other
people's lives, to have intense relation
ships for days or weeks or months and
then to let go completely. For instance,
when people die or go away, there
might be a few moments where a hole
opens in my heart, a few days or weeks
where I feel them hovering just over
my right shoulder, but soon, I don't
even miss them. I can't imagine their
faces except as they appear in photo
graphs. This is not to say I won't later,
sometimes, over the years, think of the
kids from the shelter or check the obit
uaries. I will. Two walls of the office are glass, the
fan swirls the smoke from the coun
selors' cigarettes, shafts of morning
light slice through the tamaracks. This
is the first I've heard of molestation
and Sammy has been with us for three
days, a long weekend. The screen door
slaps shut as the kids take out the
garbage, hang the throw rugs on the
line. I get up and go inside, pull Fernando into the pantry and whisper
the news. Goes with the territory, he
says. Good thing we do bed checks, he
says. Michael, chair pulled up to the
sink, is helping Dina wash dishes. 1
take him back out to the meeting with
me. A red toy truck. Michael plays with
a red toy truck at my feet.
Angela has been meeting her
stepfather in motel rooms. In the
morning staffing, in the room with
two walls of glass, with smoke
swirling, I am told this story. Two or
three details and a whole life opens up.
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Publisher: University of Northern Iowa, 1222 West 27th Street, Cedar Falls, Iowa 50614-9990
Editor: Grant Tracey, North American Review, 1222 West 27th Street, Cedar Falls, Iowa 50614-0516
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But how much is memory and how
much invention? Was her name
Angela? Did her mother bring her or
did she come in on her own? She was a
tall girl with long reddish hair, ordi
nary in the way many girls are. There
was a younger sister. Is this why she
told? Is this why the mother brought her? Finally listened?
When did it start? She could have been six, she could have been ten,
fourteen. Sometimes it's not rape,
sometimes it's seduction. This is what
Christine says in the meeting. Sometimes the girl... but what was
the rest of the sentence?... is willing? Needs him? Wants him? But it's always a betrayal, I say. Isn't it? Oh, yes, she
says. Yes. And it may not stop. Even
now that she's told. And that's another
betrayal.
A child, Christine says, is her feel
ings. The most essential, most
authentic self to a child is the way she feels and so if she's told to deny her
feelings, if she's told they don't matter, to be quiet, then she gets the message that she doesn't matter. She disappears. Or there's a disconnect between mind
and body and, if there's a disconnect, if the body is not the self, then what does
it matter? You can do anything to the
body, then. You can stick needles in it.
You can prostitute it. You can deprive it of food, burn it with your cigarette,
give your step-father sexual access. You
can drown it in alcohol. I don't want to get attached, but I
want to watch, which makes me, what?
A voyeur? Someone consumed with
other people's sadness? But maybe it's
because when I was their age, I wasn't
conscious. I was anesthetized. I
couldn't watch myself, connect with
myself—I remember looking at my own arm once, the marks and small
bruises from doing heroin, and
thinking, this is my arm? I am inside this body?—and so now, maybe, I think that in watching them I will learn something about myself. And
there is a way in which I can't differ entiate, especially with the girls. I know how it feels to be them. Or I
think I know how it feels to be them. The counselor says they can't
identify their feelings; they don't know if they are "sad" or "angry" or
"confused." They don't know how to
name it, we have to help them name
it, and I think, I don't know how to
name it.
Dina lets Michael fill the tub with
the hose, it's a round pewter washtub,
and she's put it outside in the backyard
I wonder if she can smell the alcohol oozing from
my pores... if she thinks I'm a bad mother.
on the one patch of grass. They wash
Michael's doll's hair, pour the water from a yellow margarine bowl over the
suds. I am sitting on the stoop in my sleeveless leotard and gauze skirt, my hair just washed, skirt pulled up between my thighs. The light glints off
my calves giving them a golden sheen.
Dina braids my hair while it is still
damp. So it will have waves when it's
dry, she says. Her fingers brushing my
temples. I watch Michael through
feathery eyelashes, my eyes squinted
against the sun. There is a kind of halo on the water, it's hot, my skin
reddening, white imprints of my fingers on Dina's arm, on Michael's
shoulder, on my inner thigh. The desert sun, even in October, purifies.
Inside, in the cool dark house, they are
playing pool, the click of the balls, the hum of their voices, music drifting out
of an upstairs window. Dina has to go to a group home soon. They have
found a placement for her. I tell her,
someday, when I'm finished working here, I want to adopt you. I mean it.
Absolutely.
Dina never tells me anything about
herself. I wonder if it's because she thinks I can't possibly understand, that I am so different from her. But I know
how it feels to want to be numb, to
want someone to listen, to want
someone to love you. I know how it
feels to be a small speck of yourself, to
will yourself into invisibility. Without words, I feel like I know how it is to be her, but in retrospect, I'm not sure she
felt that way at all.
Dina's nana lives downtown in the
historic district. Barrio Viejo. In an old adobe house on Main, one of those
that are built on to each other, the
high narrow windows and doorways,
corrugated tin roofs. We walk down
streets shaded and quiet, past old
houses, some look abandoned,
boarded up windows, sagging wooden
porches. The old corner grocery, no
longer a grocery, has sheets across the
windows. Past a house with white lacy curtains, the porch railing lined with ferns and succulents, geraniums
flaming on a green windowsill. All of this in the shadow of the high rises
downtown, their glass and steel and
glint of the sun. This house, Dina
gestures to the cracked stucco of a
house set back from the street, its plas tered walls white behind a dark profu sion of plants, agave leaves unfurling out of the shadows like long tongues, the junkies live here, she says, and then we're at her nana's.
Outside the house, there are
remnants of a barbed wire fence,
cactus the size of trees. On the front
porch, in coffee cans, succulents with
pink flowers grow, portulaca. A palm cross is tacked to the front door. Her
nana opens the door and stands for a
minute, allowing her eyes to adjust, the
room dark and cool behind her. She is an old Mexican woman, stooped, frail,
white hair escaping in wisps from a loose braid. Nana, Dina says. The wall
of the doorjamb is as thick as I can reach with my hand outstretched. The
rough plaster is cracking. Inside it's cool, saguaro ribs in the high ceilings. Dina's nana takes her face in both of
her hands and looks at her. In the
living room, over the old sofa, the Last
Supper is painted on velvet.
Her nana leads us to the sofa. Your
mother, Dina, she says in Spanish, she
came by last week to see how you're
doing. Dina lifts Michael to her lap. They say I have to go to a group home,
Nana.
The cords snake along the wall.
Across the way, a high bed in the lone bedroom, rag rug on the floor, mended
quilt, where all three of them slept, nana, mother, daughter. Dina growing
up here, someone tapping on the
window at night, her mother rolling over in bed, holding the curtain back, go away. The light flashes through the
high windows, sweeps along the curve
of wall and ceiling as his car passes, the
cold air coming up through the holes
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in the floor. Her mother, then, leaves
in the daytime for work, at night to go with her boyfriend. Her mother sits on
the floor in her robe, doing her nails,
holding her cigarette, just so, while her nails dry. Dina unwinds the pink sponge rollers from her hair and lets
them fall in a soft pile on the floor.
Boyfriendz, Dina says as we climb into the car. Plural. She plays with the
radio, punches it from station to
station, turns it off. But why can't I live
with my nana? She's better now. You
saw her. It isn't up to me, I say. You
know why, I say. But I'm thinking, what has Dina done that I didn't do at
her age? Is she any more lost than I
was? Why take her from her grand
mother? She turns her face to the blur
of shops as we drive down Speedway.
Okay, she says, so I messed up. I won't
do it again.
I take Michael to visit Dina at the
group home. She's been there for two
weeks and so now she can have visi
tors. It's very clean and new, not at all
like our runaway shelter. It's corporate,
funded by insurance, not grants. The
furniture matches. All of the other
girls are white. Even though Dina's half white and looks white, she's not really.
Her accent is noticeable here. She is
the only ward of the state, the only
charity case, in other words. The other
girls are here because their parents
have sent them, because they have
insurance that will cover behavioral or
mental or substance abuse problems.
One girl is staying here while her
parents tour Europe. The counselor,
who is wearing a dress and nylons and
heels, tells me this, in Dina's presence, as soon as she greets us at the door.
Perhaps she wants to make sure Dina
is properly grateful.
She leads us to a room with gold
shag carpeting, gold brocade on the
couch where Michael and I perch next
to Dina as if we are suitors awaiting
interrogation. Reminds me of the
Holiday Inn, 1 whisper to Dina,
motioning towards the painting on the
wall, towards the plastic plant in the
plastic gold and white planter. She
doesn't smile. I realize she's never been
to a Holiday Inn. She is in trouble for
smoking. Can she go out for a soda? Dina isn't allowed to leave, yet, except
to go to school. The counselor smiles,
pats Dina on the shoulder. Those are
the rules. Same for everyone, Dina, you know that. She sits on a stool at the
breakfast bar and pretends to read her
newspaper.
Dina shrugs at my questions. She
looks over at the counselor, rolls her
eyes, and shrugs. Nothing more. Dina,
I say, try to make the best of it. You
can't come back to the shelter. I wish
you could. .. I know she wants to.
We've become a kind of home to her.
She'd already been with us for two
thirty-day stays. We broke the rules for
her, but I know they can't do it again.
It's not for long, I tell her. Maybe you'll
like the other girls if you talk to them.
Maybe they'll find you another foster
mother. Maybe... This sidelong look. Still that thick makeup, a black line all around her eyes.
My mother is slicing sourdough
bread, thin, and spreading it with butter and garlic. She has come home
to her house, where Michael and I are
hanging out, to join us for lunch. It is
our day off. (Last night, our night off.
Eight vodka gimlets: two to relax, two
to stop worrying about Dina, then four
to stop seeing Trish in the cabs with
truckers and Angela and her stepfather
in the hotel room. I poked my cheek
with my fingertip to make sure I was
comfortably numb.) Michael and I
have come over with baskets of
laundry, but maybe, I tell him, if the
water is warm enough, we'll go for a
swim. For sure, we'll walk up to the
park. The park, where I can push him
on the swings and catch him at the end
of the slide and we can feel like a
regular mother and child on an
outing—although, for him, a regular
day, a normal day, must now include
several teenagers who sometimes need
as much attention as he does. (Where
is Fernando? I have no memory.
Perhaps gone to his second job or to a
class he's taking in social work.) My mother places the bread under the
broiler, adds a few leaves of basil from
her garden, large slices of tomato, thin
slices of Havarti cheese and then under
the broiler again until the cheese is just
curving down over the tomato, just
bubbling from the heat, the bubbles
edged brown. I squeeze tangerines for
juice, we sit at a card table in the
square of light that falls through the
sliding glass door of the family room.
(I know, at this moment, that Angela's mother is taking her to a clinic to see
about an abortion. It is her stepfather's
child but, chances are, the mother still
won't leave him.) The lawn outside is
still greenish, a resident family of quail scurries beneath the orange tree.
Michael is lying on his stomach
watching cartoons. He wants a choco
late long john. How about cream of
wheat? Or a cheese sandwich? He
makes a face. I close my eyes and feel
the sun on my back. Contrary to
popular opinion, I tell my mother,
cheese sandwiches are great for break
fast. After we eat, she kisses Michael
goodbye and then me, on the forehead,
her lipstick waxy and perfumed. (I wonder if she can smell the alcohol
oozing from my pores; I wonder if she
thinks I am a bad mother.) Her heels
click across the linoleum. Michael
climbs up on my lap and I wrap one
arm around him, feel his solid weight against my chest, rest my chin on his
head. You smell like a puppy, I tell him.
Veronica calls. She's had a baby boy.
South Tucson, the air in winter is thin
and clear, laced with the smell of
burning mesquite. Veronica answers
the door with the bundle, which is named LeRoi Jr. Teenaged girls always
name their boy babies after the father
even when the father is nowhere to be
found, so LeRoi Jr. he is, light-skinned, plump lips a smooth petal pink. His hair nappy, not that dark shock of hair that Indian and Mexican babies often
have, his eyes a wide milky blue that will change to brown. Veronica gazes at
him. She seems calmer, no longer
jiggling a sock full of change. The house is clean, clean, the concrete
floors, cold, tiled here and there, where
the tile hasn't been worn away, with
scraps of mismatched linoleum. All is
swept bare. La Virgen de Guadalupe on
the white wall. Her nana shuffles out
of her room in old slippers and a robe.
Veronica hands me the baby. The nana
sits at the small wooden table,
smoothes the oilcloth with her thin
brown fingers while Veronica scram
bles beans and eggs for her. Heats
coffee, a tortilla. The baby sleeps on
my legs, his soft breathing and curled
fingers. Can I believe that having the
Fall 2010 NORTH AMERICAN REVIEW 37
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baby has, will transform her? For me,
even pregnancy was transformative. I
quit doing drugs, quit smoking, came
to see my body as essential because his
body depended on it, and so I believe transformation is possible. When he
was born, even my relationship to the
world shifted. In becoming a mother, I
became an adult. But I was twenty. It
wasn't easy. Veronica is sixteen. I had a
husband, a mother, a mother-in-law,
sisters, and sisters-in-law. Veronica is
on her own here. Her nana needs her
as much as the baby does and being needed too much can become a kind
of claustrophobia. This is why she
called, maybe, maybe she needs help, is afraid of what will happen. Needs air.
The baby, his head fits in my hand, that's how small his head is, it fits in the palm of my hand. The layer of
flesh is thin, the skin thinner, the soft
spot pulses. Everything about this baby is delicate, especially its skull above the
concrete floor.
Christmas Eve, Dina stumbles out to
the car. Climbs into the backseat next
to Michael. She giggles. Says she took four valium before she realized they were ten milligram tabs instead of five.
Christmas Eve at Fernando's mother's
house, his brothers and sisters sitting around the kitchen table, eating red
meat tamales, nibbling pumpkin pie, then opening presents with their chil
dren in the living room.
In the pictures, later, Michael's
cheeks look ruddy with fever, his eyes glittery. Why didn't I notice? Was I too
preoccupied with Dina? Had I drunk that much wine? Dina. Rubber lady.
Sliding down the arm of Fernando's
mother's couch.
Christmas morning, the light is gray, the oranges on the trees in front of the
group home look fake. Dina sits
hunched against the door of the car. I
don't want to see you again when
you're high, I tell her.
Fine. You won't.
Her face closes, but my heart is
already closed. I am turning away from
her. I am already trying to forget her. I
know, somehow, that I will never see
her again and that in her heart, she
will feel I have abandoned her, one
person in a long line of many. And I
have. There is no other way to think
about it.
The car door creaks under its
own weight, falls shut. The cold air
closes behind her as she walks. The
weak December light, the lumpy
oranges on the trees in front of the
whitewashed wall, the black
wrought iron gate, all those stay immediate and vivid while Dina's face fades and fades.
This is what I will tell myself: the
streets are full of lost children. Even
their mothers abandoned them. Did you think you could be different? Save them?
For how long do you think you will
even remember their names? Dina,
Veronica, Trish, Sammy, Kenny, Paul,
Angela, Curtis (whose older brothers
helped his father beat their mother),
Rosemary, Gabby, Wendy, Brian, Alma
(who loved another girl), Manuela (the girl she loved), JoAnna, Doug, Moira,
Todd (who, like Dina, kept coming back), Jeff (who will pull an empty gun on a cop, suicide by police), and then the girl, the Navajo girl, Barbara?, who
saw ghosts upstairs and was afraid to
fall asleep. There were others, many
more, maybe a hundred others. But that
spring, I will get pregnant and one of
the kids, Jimmy, an eight-year-old pyro maniac, will threaten to kick me in the
belly, in the belly, he says, belly, his
word, and kill your baby. And I will grab him by his armpits and drag him across
the picnic table. Say that again, I tell him, giving him a hard shake and I'll kill you. I mean it. And I know his
history, I know his mother is a prosti tute and that her boyfriends started
blowing pot smoke in his face when he
was two, I know the counselor has just taken him off Ritalin, 1 know the other
kids have been teasing him, and still I mean it. With all my heart and gut, with both arms and both hands and my
teeth, I mean it. If I were another
person, I would divide in two. I would
have a life where I could take care of
this child, these other children, and then
go home and grow basil or something. Clean the kitchen. I would be noble and
calm. But I have only the one life and,
often, within it, I am not calm or
reasonable or understanding. My rage, as I am shaking this child, scares me.
And so I put in our notice and buy a
small house from a Mormon woman
on the northwest side of town. Far
from the shelter. I have decided we
should become exiles. I am tired, I
guess, of being inhabited by others, which is what working with the kids at the shelter feels like. All of these chil dren, their sorrows get lodged in me,
and I cannot dislodge them, not even
from my dreams. When I go to the
grocery store, as I am testing the toma
toes or avocados, complete strangers sometimes tell me their stories. It's as
if I have become a magnet, a recep
tacle, something on my face must
invite them. I am not a storyteller, but
a story-hearer, a sin-eater, and I wish
there were some way to transform
these details into a poem or a song, into sound, pure sound, music, because
then I could open my mouth and their
sorrows would go out into the air, have
a place to resonate that is not inside
of me. □
38 NORTH AMERICAN REVIEW Fall 2010
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