"Shhh," Yvonne said, cuddling the space alien, stroking its indented head. "Such a pretty little baby. Don't you listen to that bad girl laughing, mija. You're my baby, yes you are."
Later, Yvonne lay on the orange mat, blowing and counting, and I put the tennis balls under her back, switched to the rolled towels. I held the watch and timed her contractions, I breathed with her, we both hyperventilated. She wasn't nervous. "Don't worry," Yvonne said, smiling up at me, her belly like a giant South Sea Island pearl in a cocktail ring. "I been through this before."
They explained about the epidural and drugs, but no one there was going to have drugs. They all wanted the natural experience. It all seemed wrapped in plastic, unreal, like stewardesses on planes demonstrating the seat belts and the pattern for orderly disembarkation in case of crash at sea, the people taking a glance at the cards in the seat pocket in front of them. Sure, they thought, no problem. A peek at the nearest exit and then they were ready for in-flight service, peanuts and a movie.
RENA SOAKED UP the fierce April sun in her black macrame bikini, drinking a tumbler of vodka and Fresca, she called it a Russian Margarita. The men from the plumbing contractor next door loitered by the low chain-link fence, sucking their teeth at her. She pretended she didn't notice, but slowly applied Tropic
Tan to the tops of her breasts, stroked down her arms, while the workmen grabbed their crotches and called out suggestions in Spanish. The metal chaise was half-collapsed beneath her, we were lulled by the sound of the rusty sprinkler watering the lawn of crabgrass and dandelions.
"You're going to get skin cancer," I said.
She rolled her bottom lip out. "We 're dead long time, kiddo." She liked to say these American words, knowing how they sounded in her mouth. She lifted her Russian Margarita, drank. "Naqdaroviye."
It meant to your health, but she didn't care about that. She lit a black cigarette, let the smoke rise in arabesques.
I was sitting on an old lawn chair in the shade of the big oleander, sketching Rena as she soaked up the blistering UV rays. She sprayed herself with a small bottle filled with ice water, and the men watching over the chain-link fence shuddered. You could see the shape of her nipples through the knitted fabric. She smiled to herself.
This is what she loved, to make a few plumber's grunts come in their pants. A sale, a Russian Margarita, a quickie in the bathroom with Sergei, that was as far into the future as she cared to look. I admired her confidence. Skin cancer, lung cancer, men, furniture, junk, something would always come along. It was good for me to be around her now. I could not afford to think about the future.
I had only two months until graduation, and then a short fall off the edge of the world. At night, I dreamed of my mother, she was always leaving. I dreamed I missed a ride out to New York for art school, I lost an invitation to a party with Paul Trout. I stayed up and looked through my stack of twelve-year-old ArtNewses I'd found on trash day, studied the photographs of the women artists, their tangled hair, gray, long brown, stringy blond. Amy Ayres, Sandal Mclnnes, Nicholette Reis. I wanted to be them. Amy, with her curly gray hair and her wrinkled T-shirt, posing in front of her huge abstract of curved cones and cylinders. Amy, how can I be you? I read your article, but I can't find the clue. Your middle-class parents, your sick father. Your art teacher in high school created a scholarship for you. At Marshall I didn't even have art.
I gazed down at my drawing of Rena, dotted with water from the sprinkler. Really, I didn't even like drawings. When I went to the museum, I looked at paintings, sculptures, anything but lines on a piece of paper. It was just that my hand needed something to do, my eye needed a reason to shape the space between Rena and the sprinkler she had running and her wobbly-legged table of rusted white diamond mesh that held one drink and an ashtray. I liked the way the tabletop echoed the black diamonds of her bikini and the chain-link fence, how the curve of her tumbler was the same as the curve of her raised thigh and the taller man's arm draped over the fence, and leaves on the banana tree at the Casados' house across the street.
If I didn't draw, what reason would there be for the way the light fell on the scallop of tiles on the Casados' roof, and the lumpy tufts of lawn, the delicate braids of green foxtails soon to go brown, and the way the sky seemed to squash everything flat to the earth like an enormous foot? I'd have to get pregnant, or drink, to blur it all out, except for myself very large in the foreground.
Lucidly I wasn't in the classes where they talked about college. I was in the classes where they told us about condoms and bringing guns to school. Claire signed me up for all the honors classes, but I couldn't hold on. If she were alive, I might have tried, followed up, asked for a scholarship, I would know what to do. Now all that was slipping away.
On the other hand, I still went to school, did the work, took the tests. I was going to graduate, for all that meant. Niki thought I was an idiot. Who would know if I went or not, who would care? But it was still something to do. I went and drew the chair legs, the way they looked like the legs of water striders. I could spend an hour exaggerating the perspective of all the desks diminishing toward the blackboard, the backs of heads, necks, hair. Yolanda Collins sat in front of me in math class. I could gaze at the back of her head all period long, the layers of tiny braids laced together in designs intricate as Persian rugs, sometimes with beads or cord woven in.
I looked down at the pad in my hands. At least I had this diamond-shaped pattern, the trapezoid of the gate. Wasn't that enough? Did there have to be more?
I looked at Rena, slathering on her Tropic Tan, baking to medium-well in the blistering sun, happy as a cupcake in frilled paper. "Rena, you ever wonder why people get out of bed in the morning? Why do they bother? Why not just drink turpentine?"
Rena turned her head to the side, shaded her eyes with her hand, glanced at me, then went back to sunny-side up. "You are Russian I think. A Russian always ask, what is meaning of life." She pulled a long, depressed face. "What is meaning of life, maya liubov? Is our bad weather. Here is California, Astrid darling. You don't ask meaning. Too bad Akhmatova, but we got beach volleyball, sports car, tummy tuck. Don't worry, be happy. Buy something."
She smiled to herself, arms down at her sides, eyes closed, glistening on her chaise lounge like bacon frying in a pan. Small beads of water clung to the tiny hairs of her upper lip, pooled between her breasts. Maybe she was the lucky one, I thought, a woman who had divested herself of both future and past. No dreams, no standards, a woman who smoked and drank and slept with men like Sergei, men who were spiritually what came up out of the sewers when it rained. I could learn from her. Rena Grushenka didn't worry about her teeth, didn't take vitamin C.
She ate salt on everything and was always drunk by three. She certainly didn't feel sick because she wasn't going to college and making something of her life. She lay in the sun and gave the workmen hard-ons while she could.