‘What about her?’ asks Chela.
‘She died. Two years ago.’
All the air leaves Chela’s body. You can hear it — one long breath — and in its wake, a feeble whimper. She also raises her knuckles to her mouth, frowns, and bites her hand. A moment of transparent emotion which reminds Marina of their age gap, because she doesn’t remember ever having reacted to anything like that: with an exhalation of empathetic pain.
A moment later, Chela gets up and goes to the sofa. She rolls a joint, and the whole time her eyes weep in that same disconnected way, as if they were simply raining. Under her breath, over and over again she says, ‘Fucking hell.’ Marina joins her on the sofa and they smoke in silence, each of them perched on one end, separated by a small lake of yellow vinyl and an ashtray with the words ‘The Mustard Mug’ on it. Neither woman’s feet touch the ground: Marina is hugging her knees and Chela has her legs crossed in lotus. On the radio, Nina Simone melts the words ‘daddy’, ‘sugar’, ‘bowl’.
‘I miss him,’ Marina thinks. ‘How sick am I?’
She misses her daddy like one misses the light of a house where you no longer live. A subtle but unremitting absence: his sullenness, a phantom limb. Or not his sullenness, but certainly the tension he planted in the air. And the other thing: the subsequent release. The exhaustion the family collapsed into after he’d walked off slamming the door, like a kind of post-coital bliss, only post-violence. A silence so passive it felt like peace.
Chela lets out a snotty giggle.
‘One time,’ she says, pointing with her chin to the portrait of Doctor Vargas, ‘Beto went to wake up Noelia in the middle of the night because I had a terrible pain. She came round in her nightgown, checked me over and diagnosed me with trapped wind. That’s what she said to me: “Don’t worry, Chelita, this is what we call ‘trapped wind’, and it’ll pass in no time.” She gave me a few Pepto-Bismols or something like it and sent me to bed. But the next day I went to the hospital and it turned out I had peritonitis.’
‘One time,’ Marina says, ‘my dad put on a show with soap bubbles just for me.’
Someone had hired out the restaurant for a birthday party and Marina was in the kitchen when a clown went in to ask for a tray with some water. Up until that moment, she hadn’t minded being the girl in the kitchen. In fact, she liked it, because she felt superior to all the other kids who didn’t work. But the clown thing she did mind, Marina explained, because they weren’t allowed out of the kitchen, and she and her brother had to watch the show through the round windows in the swing doors, Marina propped on an upturned bucket which she had to move each time a waiter went in or out. But later that same night, among the remaining balloons and the chairs already turned upside down, her dad rehashed the show for her in a modest private function. He made her sit down at the table in the middle of the restaurant, then served her a Coca-Cola in a wine glass and all of the leftover cake — half the birthday girl’s name still legible in the icing. Whereas the clown had used two sticks and a rope to make his bubbles, her father filled a soup bowl with warm water and washing-up liquid. He wet his hand in the mixture and then slid the tip of his thumb outwards against his index fingertip, forming, once the two fingertips were touching, a small, thin film. He took a drag of his cigarette and exhaled into the film between his fingers, which inflated into a bubble filled with smoke. She wanted the bubbles to last longer. That’s what she remembers most clearly: that they lasted a very short time, less than normal bubbles, because they never really managed to float. She asked her dad to stop doing it with the smoke, but he wanted to do them like that. It was one of the clown’s tricks. The bubbles came out a kind of green-gray, and when they popped a waft of smoke hung in the air for a moment before disappearing. Back then Marina didn’t have a smoker’s mentality, and wasn’t able to appreciate what she now points out to Chela:
‘What an ingenious guy, no? Great way to justify his ciggie in the middle of a kids’ party. You’d never get away with it today.’ And then, without a pause, Marina adds, ‘I wish my dad had walked out on us.’
‘You don’t mean that.’
‘I do. He was a dad to remember, not to keep; he still is.’
‘What are you trying to say to me?’
‘Nothing.’
Marina wants to talk about the shoes. About the witchy, leather shoes.
‘Where did you get those shoes?’
But Chela ignores her. She crosses her arms, clutching a hand with each armpit, and leans forward. ‘Do you think,’ she asks very attentively, a lot like Marina’s therapist, ‘I should go knock for Pina tomorrow? For her, I mean, would it do her any good if I did?’
But Mr. Therapist never asks her truly difficult things like this. Marina would rather go back to talking about herself than answer this, even if it means conjuring the unfamiliar first person: she’d rather be analyzed than handed the threads that tie other people to their children. She’d rather Chela ask her anything else: even about her weight.
Marina blinks in an attempt to look confused; she wants to do a Chela and ignore the question, move onto something else. Weren’t they talking about her? Yes, about her and her dad, or about Doctora Vargas, but not about Chela, and certainly not about Pina. At the same time it flatters her in some way that Chela asks for her opinion. But it also — she realizes finally, and not without some surprise — makes her mad.
It makes her mad. Really pisses her off. They drive her fucking crazy, these irresponsible parents, and she can feel the carbs pulsing in her legs: the rage and the energy. The crepes start to ferment in her bile, and the real intentions behind dessert become clear to her: a posteriori comfort: that goddamn fixation of parents with alleviating their guilt with sugary treats. Of making everything better by having kids. Procreation as a palliative. She too, by the way, has considered it: stopping her pill to see if at last Chihuahua will agree to move in with her, to share the bills: ‘Bat for the same team,’ she says. ‘As if putting up with you were a game!’ he says. The last time they fought, Marina asked him to ‘contain her’. Later on, with a helping nudge from Mr. Therapist of course, she saw the connection: she wants someone to contain her, and that’s why she flirts with the idea of becoming a container herself, of fabricating a living remedy in her tummy, something to entertain them, something that’ll renew them. (The game is: Russian Dolls.) And then? If it doesn’t work out you pack up and move to the tropics. Marina instantly throws the idea out again. She wants to take her pill right now in case Chihuahua calls, but Chela is still there in front of her, waiting attentively, doglike. Marina spots the bronco, takes a running jump and straddles it.
‘Truthfully?’ The nape of her neck shudders.
Chela says yes, smiling to encourage her to go on. She has some wrinkles on her cheeks that Marina hadn’t noticed until now; two semicircles, which don’t make her any less beautiful, but simply exist there as evidence that life doesn’t turn out how you plan it.
‘Truthfully, I don’t think it’d do her any good,’ Marina says.
She knows she’s doing it all wrong, but it feels right to do it wrong. She even moves her hands like her therapist does when he’s explaining things.
‘She must have grieved very hard for you. And if she’s already processed that, if she’s already gone through the different stages, you’re only going to come and whip the rug from under her feet. Some damage is irreversible, in my view.’
Chela doesn’t stop nodding her head, very slowly, soaking in the wisdom that Marina — at least at this moment — really does believe she possesses. In the second before she continues her monologue, Marina asks herself what Linda will have to say about all this: will she see that Marina is doing Pina a favor because Chela is a mom to remember, not to keep? Or will she disapprove of Marina’s impromptu project? Anyway, it’s too late to go back now. Marina can feel a small vortex winding its way up her sternum; her jargon bulb lights up; she defines every one of the grieving stages; pontificates briefly on the Electra complex; she comes up with absurd artistic references for the loss of a mother: the Pietà, ‘but the other way round’. And all the while one part of her is saying, ‘keep-your-nose-out-little-girl’, and the other part sticks two fingers up at her inner brother and leads her on in her blundering revenge (for all the damaged kids out there!) while she takes Chela’s hands and tells her, ‘Don’t fuck her up any more than you already have, Chela.’