Kantika, page 24
“How’s my good girl?” he greets Luna one morning in the kitchen, and Luna, still on the edge of sleep and trying to shed a nightmare where she was under arrest for an unspecified crime, blurts, “I’m not actually good, Papa, not deep down.”
“Of course you are, Luna. You’re the best girl in the world, you and your sister.” Papa pauses, then adds, in a quieter voice, “And your other sister, too, of blessed memory.”
They sit in silence. Luna can hear the ticking of the cuckoo clock, and from upstairs, the thump of Frank’s feet hitting the floor as he gets out of bed. Papa stands to go wash up at the kitchen sink, first his face and then—soaping, lathering, rinsing, thorough as always—his hands. What was the name of my other sister, Luna wants to ask, and did she come out dead or die soon afterward, and did you see her, hold her, and who died first, my mother or the baby, and did I see her, and was she damaged like me, a throwaway child?
But you do not ask Papa these sorts of questions. Unlike Mother, who is full of stories of her fairy-tale childhood and the slew of troubles that came after it, he rarely talks about his past. When he turns away from the sink, his face is zipped shut. He takes his shirt from the curtain rod and puts it on over his undershirt, fastening the buttons without looking down. Then he plants a kiss on Luna’s forehead, grabs his hat from its hook and cigarettes from the counter and is gone, though she catches one last glimpse of him through the kitchen window. He is leaning forward, almost running through the bruised purple air, trailing smoke as dawn changes into day.
* * *
THEY ARE HAVING DINNER when Tiya Rachel first brings up the school in the Bronx. They’ve just finished eating, the table a riot of dishes, silverware and crumpled napkins, and Luna is sleepily full. Papa’s relatives—usually just Nona and Rachel but sometimes also Sarah and her family—come to Cambria Heights once a month or so for dinner, always on Sundays when the store is closed, though Luna would rather go with Papa to the Bronx, where no one expects her to help clean up and she can gorge on candied oranges and baklava.
“Somebody pays for this school,” Tiya Rachel goes on. “A rich couple who had a crippled child who died, and they made a school for crippled children but only unusually bright ones—you have to get in, they make you take a test, and if you get in, you don’t pay a cent. It’s a private school, but free! The lady who told me about it sent her son there. He went on to City College and now he’s an accountant, doing very well for himself. He even got married to a girl he met at the school. Maybe you should take a look, Luna, just to see?”
Rachel is asking her? Luna feels suddenly adult, her very future in her hands, but before she can respond, Papa says curtly, “Thank you but no thank you, Rachel—we know about this school from Dr. Carlson, but Luna is thriving at her regular school. Did I tell you she’s on the honor roll?” (Luna rolls her eyes. Only a thousand times.)
Tiya Rachel looks at Luna, who looks at her plate. On her last visit to the Bronx, in a rare moment of candor, she had confided to her aunt about how much she disliked the high school, not because of the work but because she has no friends. Tiya Rachel had listened, sitting beside her on the couch. When Luna was done, she had cried into the starch-scented calico of her aunt’s knobby shoulder, but only for a few seconds—she is no crybaby, not with her teasing, tough-guy brothers, and she has her pride. Rachel, out of all Papa’s siblings, is by far the nicest. Even Mother, no fan of his family, admires her and counts her as a friend. She was born with one leg shorter than the other and wears a clunky shoe with a rubber lift, and her husband, a drunk no-goodnik, abandoned her a few years ago for a younger woman so she’s a divorcée, and sometimes her pain shows in her eyes, but she is also practical and smart and has one son in college and another in medical school, and she supports her family with a job in the garment district and takes care of Nona, too. Luna appreciates Rachel because she doesn’t talk down to her, but now she feels a ripple of mistrust. Did she open up to her aunt only to feed a plan to dump her in another cripple school?
“They have professors from the Teachers College who come in to lecture,” Rachel is saying. “It might be unique in the world to have a school like this. She’d have a chance to meet other children like herself, bright ones but with physical challenges. To make friends. And did I mention that it’s free?”
Papa clears his throat. “You mentioned,” he says dryly. “Thank you, Rachel, but I’m a homeowner now, a small business owner. We don’t need to accept charity. Anyway, the Bronx is much too far. There’s no way I could drive her every day.”
“Oh no, she’d live with us and see you every weekend. And it’s not charity, it’s a scholarship, for every child who goes there. That’s just how it works. She’d stay with us.”
Nona, who might have been sleeping from the look of her, jerks her head up and echoes, “With us!”
Papa shakes his head. “I’m not sending my daughter to live away from home and go to school on some rich stranger’s dime. Luna’s only fourteen. Her public school is excellent, with top teachers. That school is why we’re here, right, Rebecca? It was the first thing we looked for in a neighborhood. The first and last.”
Mother, who has been busying herself with herding crumbs into a small pile with the edge of her butter knife, looks up. “That’s right. She’ll make friends, it just takes time. We’re like in the Bible”—she laughs lightly, though nothing is funny and the laugh is strained—“strangers in a strange land. Pasensya.”
Then David pipes up, speaking English. “That school nearly did me in.”
Luna turns toward him; they all do. David never says much—he keeps to himself and has had an eye on the door ever since he first showed up, a sullen little boy from Spain—so when he speaks, you listen.
“Ke?” asks Mother. “What is this, deed me een?”
He turns his hand into a gun and takes aim—POP POP—at his own forehead as if to blow his brains out. “It almost killed me,” he says. “There’s a reason it’s called Andrew Jackass High. That place is a hellhole, for Luna, too. She walks to the bus alone and cries in her room. Haven’t you heard her? How can you not? Every night, she cries. If it were me, I’d get the hell out. I mean”—he shrugs—“I did.”
“Watch your mouth,” Papa says. “You were failing your courses. A lazy numbskull when it comes to school, I’m sorry to say. Luna brings home straight A’s.”
David’s face floods with color, and Luna feels a stab of sympathy for him and is tempted to tell him he’s no numbskull and that Papa knows so, too (she once overheard him tell Mother that David was dumb like a fox and just didn’t apply himself in school), and that last term she got a B in Math, which Papa also knows. But she says nothing. Mostly, they are—at least to the outside world—one big, happy-enough family, but when the lines get drawn, it’s her and Papa against Mother, David and Albert, back to the beginning, back to blood.
“David”—Mother turns to Papa—“is mechanical. No need to insult him. Every person has some gift. Just look at this chandelier he built for me, like a sculpture, you could sell it for a lot of—”
“Stop, Ma.” David claps, a sharp sound. “Please stop.”
“It’s a lovely piece of work. And you’re so right, Rebecca, everyone has something,” says Rachel. “But we were talking about Luna, how she cries in her room. We were discussing what’s best for her.”
“Luna is here,” Luna cries out finally. “I am here!”
“Of course you are, mi alma,” says Mother.
They all turn to look at Luna. Her arms have started flapping wildly, but no one notices, or if they do, they don’t pay any mind because (sometimes it’s all she wants in the world) they’re used to her.
“Do you cry in your room?” asks Papa tenderly.
Only later will it occur to Luna that if the others have heard her crying, he must have, too, though he gets home late and rises early so maybe he missed it, or maybe he turns the noise into a different one, for Papa is not a crier or complainer and doesn’t like to see it in a child.
“Sometimes she does,” confirms Suzanne. “Me, too, if I’m sad or can’t find Dolly.”
“Buncha crybabies,” says Al scornfully, and then, as if on cue, Frank is wailing, falling apart—it’s past his bedtime—and Papa is pushing back his chair and telling Nona and Rachel that he must drive them home, it’s getting late, he still has to balance the books when he gets back. Mother unstraps Frank from the high chair and hoists him to her hip, and the other children get up and start to clear. Luna is supposed to help, but as her family clatters into motion all around her, she lowers her head to the table, feeling the slick surface of the oilcloth against her cheek, and shuts her eyes.
“Get up, Lazy Loony!” Al chants as he pokes her in the shoulder.
She opens one eye. Above her, the chandelier, an imitation ship’s wheel that David built for Mother in wood shop, casts its ring of watery golden light. Mother carries Frank up to bed, her footfalls sounding on the stairs.
Luna is exhausted but also strangely happy, at the center of the circle. Rachel and Nona want her. Mother called her mi alma. David noticed her. She will, she vows, make friends with him, beginning by telling him how Papa said he was dumb like a fox (so not at all).
II
REBECCA IS WEEDING the hopeful pansy and petunia patch she planted for her mother by the basement window when she sees them, David and Al kneeling on the basement floor, Luna sitting on the step stool, her blouse unbuttoned, her brassiere pushed down, and they are leaning, reaching (which boy? Both boys, hands like ham hocks; she wants to shut her eyes, unsee, but because she is a mother, she must look) for Luna’s breasts.
Rap on the basement window (she cannot move). Yell (she cannot speak). What happens next? There is no next. Time slows and pleats, drops down on buckled knees, and so Rebecca gapes and stares but does not—maybe for five seconds, maybe ten—act, instead observing through the windowpane: two boy-men with their arms raised as if in supplication, the girl sitting strangely still, eyes shut, mouth an open O of … what? Protest and shock? Invitation? (“She planned it,” each boy will later insist when questioned separately. And Luna: “They forced me, made me show”). Even in the horror of the moment, it is impossible not to register something of the tableau-like nature of the scene: three lush heads of hair, black, brown and blond; three young bodies, at once foreign and familiar—two Rebecca knit, one she repaired—poised between childhood and adulthood. And at the center of it all, the pale, lit spectacle of Luna’s perfect new breasts.
A lunge, a hand (whose hand?) reaching out. Luna lets out a pained sound, barely audible through the glass, and Rebecca lurches into motion, rapping both fists on the windowpane and calling out in several languages. “Guay de mi! No se tokes! Kanios con lodos! Don’t touch her! You get away from her right now!”
And then (because despite eight years in America, citizenship papers signed and sealed, a sturdy marriage with six children between them, she will never not feel a little afraid), she adds, hand pressed to her mouth, “Do you want him to send us back?”
A scurrying in the basement room she fixed up for her mother but has allowed, as time wore on and hope dimmed, to be taken over by the boys. Legs scrambling, ducked heads. She rocks onto her heels and stands up too fast, her vision swimming, and shuts her eyes to steady herself against the rough, sun-warmed bricks of the house. When she opens her eyes, the yard looks different, smaller maybe, and coated with a dust of shame. Did the neighbors hear her call out? The younger children are at the park with the high school girl from down the street. Sam is at the store. Not generally a keeper of secrets—she has a reputation among the other mothers for saying it how it is—she is already aware of having been forced into a complicated danger zone and having too many people—Luna, her sons, herself—to protect.
When she looks again, Luna is alone and fumbling at her clothes, and then she has pitched forward to the floor, where she lies bent over herself in a twisted shape, her throat exposed, one bare breast, too, the size of a new peach and pale, almost glowing in the light from above, save for its startlingly dark pink tip.
Luna starts crying, or not crying, exactly—moaning, from low in her throat, a keening, remarkably complex sound that harkens back to when she couldn’t control her limbs or bladder or put words to any but her most basic needs but could produce this sound, at once animal and mechanical, like metal scraping bone. It’s been years since Rebecca last heard it, and the effect is shattering, as if all Luna’s hard work and all her own have come undone—the years of drudge and haul, push and pull, sit up, stand proud; the years, too, of gluing together a family from shards the way the ceramics fixer of her childhood repaired a broken vase.
“I’m coming, Luna!” she calls through the window, and then she is running: up the back steps, down the hall and steep basement stairs to Luna’s side, where she kneels and takes Luna, moaning still and thrashing, alone down there—where are David and Al?—into her arms.
* * *
FIRST MOTHER SLAPS DAVID, a sharp, resounding smack on his right cheek; then she slaps Al. She is so acrobatic, it’s as if she was born slapping her own children; slap slap go her hands as Luna watches, torn between horror and vindication, from the stool. It all happened so quickly, one of them (which?) lunging at Luna after she’d said look, don’t touch, the hand squeezing hard, a burst of sparkling pain inside her chest, then a rap on the window, her brothers (they’re not really her brothers) scramming, Mother rushing down. A scream—Luna’s own—and she’d toppled off the step stool, registering a sick humiliation at having lost control. By then Mother was at her side, pulling up her brassiere, fast-buttoning her blouse. She’d helped Luna back onto the stool and started up in English—I’m so SAW-ree, dolling, I’m so SAW-ree what they done to you!—before switching into Ladino and issuing commands: “Stop screaming, Luna. Breathe in, breathe out, to the count of three. Uno dos tres, get ahold of your breath. You’ll give yourself a heart attack. Enough now. Stop!”
But Luna could not or would not stop, too far gone by then, the sound splitting her open but also strangely centering, even purifying. It has been years since she has screamed like this, but she remembers it from her earliest days: How they’d ignore her and ignore her as she lay prone in her crib or sat strapped to her chair, and she’d want something—her papa’s strong arms or a piece of candy or to see out the window or for the new lady to kiss her/love her/see her/fix her/disappear/drop dead, or her diaper was full though she was no baby, she was six, seven years old, a big girl, a basket case, a sorry sight (“She no deaf, madame!” Mother would fling back at the lady on the street. “You want people should talk of you like this?”), but when she screamed, her fury lifted her high atop a column of sound. She could see herself from above, then, down to the straight part of her hair and her knobby knees, could see their faces turning toward her, shocked pale platters. Then they’d come.
Slap slap go Mother’s hands now on David’s and Al’s cheeks, another round for each of them, even though if there’s one cardinal rule in this house, it is to never strike another person on the head; it can injure the brain, look what happened to Luna, her skull squeezed by forceps because Rahelika’s baby tunnel (what other mother talks like this?) was too small, and Mother’s brother in Spain is brain-damaged from being beaten in the head. Still, Mother found her own two sons hiding in the basement bathroom, fished them out, lined them up, then smacked them hard enough to make their heads whip around, the act shocking Luna into silence. Papa has been known to take a strap to the older boys if they lie or steal, and if you cross Mother in the kitchen, grazing while she cooks, she’ll lunge at you, often half laughing, with a wooden spoon, but this is different, head-on, meant to hurt. Finally, Mother drops her hands to her sides. Al has started crying, thick, gulpy sobs, but David stands with his jaw set and fists clenched, staring at the floor.
“Silans, Alberto!” Mother stands on tiptoes in her green gardening galoshes, squinting up at the boys, who have shot past her in height. “Stop crying, be quiet. Which one of you grabbed her? Or did you both? What happened? Tell me, I’m all ears. Tell the truth.”
The boys shift and shuffle, exchanging glances, but they will not turn each other in.
Mother groans. “Right now, and may God forgive me, I’m ashamed to call you my sons. Luna, who grabbed you on your poor bosoms?”
Luna wants to think it was David—she is closer to Al—but suspects the opposite, for Al is all impulse, and younger and stupider, though they’re both plenty stupid, which is why Al will follow David to technical school, but also not stupid, with an ease in the outside world (they have friends, they ride bikes, they’ve kissed girls—this one is stacked, that one’s a looker) that fills her with an acid jealousy.
“David,” Luna says, and then, as his gaze bores into her, adds, “I think, I’m not sure,” because in fact it happened so fast, she has no idea.
“It was Al,” says David, and for the first time in Luna’s memory, she thinks he might be about to cry. Then his voice grows hard, and he switches into English. “But Luna started it. She followed us down here, said she had something to show us, and then she just”—he shrugs—“took ’em out. Right, Al?” He looks at his brother, who nods. “But it was Al who grabbed her. It wasn’t me.” David shudders. “I wouldn’t touch her with a ten-foot pole.”
Al blubbers, sobs and spills more crocodile tears from his big blue eyes. “I’m sorry, I’m so sorry—Lunita, Mother, Mama, can you ever forgive me, I’m a wicked boy, I don’t know what happened, can you find it in your hearts”—suddenly he has summoned great powers of oration—“to forgive me?”
Luna, far from tears now, says coldly, “Not on your life, I will never forgive you,” though already she has started to and is even a little flattered that she evoked such hunger and that he couldn’t help himself (but why the squeeze, the bruise?). The sad truth is that she is more upset with David for telling Mother that she started it, and especially for his comment about the ten- foot pole.
