All My Relations (19 page)

Tears came to Annie's eyes. “That's a terrible story,” she said, taking my hands in hers. “I liked you since you came in.”

Every hair, my prick, stood on end, straining toward her. I kissed her mouth.

“I don't come,” she crooned in my ear, as if it were the most lascivious suggestion imaginable.

We made love all our first twenty-four hours in the shoebox house. Through thin blue curtains sunlight drenched the bed, built into an alcove, and there we were, somebody's butt in the air, somebody's face buried in someone else's neck. Finally Annie was distinct, sitting beside me, untangling her hair with a stiff brush.

I had no background, I said. My history began with her. I lived in the sensations of my hands slippery over her body, the musk of her armpit and groin, her breast shaped to my mouth.

“I'd do anything to make you come,” I said.

“Lick my asshole?”

It was salty as the rest of her.

“Lock yourself in the closet and stay there all day?”

I took the key in with me and turned it. The light sucked out, I sat in the exploding and collapsing densities, palms wet, breath tight.

“Please come out. I'm going to call the fire department.” She beat the door. “The kettle's boiling. If you're not out by the time I count a hundred, I'm going to pour it on my arm.”

“No you won't,” I yelled back, and she burst into sobs.

The radio came on top volume, then the vacuum cleaner.

About noon I came out. The house was immaculate. Paper towels folded into birds spilled from the glasses on the table. “Easy,” Annie said. “This is how the maids do it at home. But I'm not ready. Go back in.” She laughed, silver hoop earrings dangling. The line of her cheekbones was so clean I could feel a coolness around her head.

She served caviar on a filagreed silver dish, relic of her family's Mexico City origins; chilled wine; her one consistent success, poached fish.

“It's not enough,” she said.

A few days later Annie said, “I think I feel something,” and she came. “Oh,” she kept saying, tossing her head, eyes closed. Side by side we lay in the sopping bedclothes. Only her finger moved, tracing my entire body as if coloring me in.

Her hands closed on my wrist as if it were my throat. “You can never leave me now,” she said, and then, “Don't ever bring another woman inside me.”

I think we might have enjoyed some repose then, but for my recurring panics. As I walked toward the Circle K one morning, something was wrong with the chinaberry trees. They became flat and stringy, then faded altogether. I felt the familiar bloating lightness. What if I fell in the street? A car skidding the corner…

“You can't go out until you're well,” Annie said. “Don't worry about work.” She took an extra shift.

Alone at night, fear made me sick. I began accompanying Annie to the bar, where I nursed a beer, chatted with the manager, shot pool. At the bar a drunk reached for her breast; I caught his wrist and smashed his fingers on the counter. “Oh, Jesus,” Annie said, hands shaking. Carrying an armload of glasses, she slipped on the rubber mat. Her ankle, twisting beneath her, broke.

Because she was employed on the sly, Annie couldn't claim disability. My assets had been seized by the IRS. Our money ran out. Though I hadn't left home alone in six weeks, I found a yard job in the classifieds. Annie swung alongside on stork-leg crutches to see me off. I was so frightened that my gas pedal foot and my hands seemed disembodied, floating beside me. But I backed out the drive. For hoeing and burning weeds I was paid cash.

Gradually potted cacti and desert shrubs accumulated in our backyard. Cheap or less, hauled from development sites, they enabled me to bid more ambitious jobs. Customers were pleased with my gravel lawns, rock and mortar whodunits, oddments of
brick and railroad tie, accented with plants. Income-producing thought issued like jet vapor from my head. With the Sun Belt boom, overpopulation had driven up water rates, and the desert was chic. By mid-fall I'd bought a monstrous old V-8 pickup and formed a crew.

Healed, Annie didn't return to the bar. Perennially employable, she took and quit jobs with an auto parts distributor, real estate office, Shaklee. Typically she drank rum-and-Coke and snoozed away the afternoon.

“You're making three hundred a week. Why should I work at all?” she said spitefully.

Why indeed? I said.

“At your jobs the women spy through the blinds when you take your shirt off,” she said.

“They don't tell me about it.”

Without the need to care for me, or earn, Annie buzzed with her own discontents. Increasingly, they centered on Mexico.

The Fall of the Herreras had occurred when Annie's grandfather, a federal minister in post-World War II Mexico City, was ousted by scandal, the family holdings confiscated. “It was jealousy, you can bet,” Annie said. “Too popular, worshipped by the poor, the old story.” He'd lived another twenty years, selling shoes in Leon.

His son, Annie's father, had smuggled her family across the border. They lived under a bridge. Annie's first memory was of clutching a junked sofa leg as the river swept away their living room. Now the Herreras were forbidden to mention that time, or even to speak Spanish. Her father, owner of a resort, was more American than Johnny Carson, Annie said.

“He betrays his kind,” she said, shrugging. When two years earlier he had confessed the affair, his wife had a stroke. “You should have seen Mama.” Annie's head slewed limply.

I suggested Annie take Spanish. Spring semester she enrolled in Level I at the community college. Our belongings acquired neatly typed labels—
la silla, el espejo, el refrigerador
—as if our house had sprouted yellow leaves. She called herself Ana.

She bought a flowered Mexican clothes hook in the border town. Bark tapestries unrolled down our walls, we drank water from hand-blown Tlaquepaque glass. Annie let her hair grow out curly, fastening it with Taxco silver combs. Our tostadas and enchiladas suizas were bathed in homemade salsa. Annie ate intently, guacamole overflowing the tortilla onto her fingers. She gained weight in her hips, belly, and chin. Then twenty-two pounds crashed in a water-only diet.

Jumping a semester to intermediate, she continued Spanish in summer school and volunteered at a clinic for illegal aliens.

In July an invitation to the Herreras' twenty-fifth anniversary provoked our first serious fight.

“I've never met them,” I insisted.

“It would humiliate me for you to see him.”

“I'll go by myself.”

Annie's arms shot out and the table went over. “I can't do that to them.” She fell into a chair.

I'd never liked my family either, I said, soothing her. Forever nicking himself, my father applied Band-Aids that perfectly matched his skin; he was the only flesh-colored person I've known. My mother applied herself to perkiness and crossword puzzles. Both brothers quit school for the service; my sister eloped at sixteen.

Mr. Herrera was sleek and compact, hair still black, but with silver handlebar mustaches. His silk shirt was the violent primary colors of jujubes, open over his hairless chest. He had that edge of embittered self-congratulation typical of showbiz personalities—“My Way,” “Made It Through the Rain.” But he could begin a story “At our anniversary fete last night the Governor
contributed a fountain of Dom Perignon ten feet high” and end “This morning already I'm unfaithful. For two hours I embraced the toilet bowl, kissing the seat.”

“Is he bluffing?” Annie hissed in my ear. “Does he think we don't know?” Mrs. Herrera's mouth still drooped at the corner, vestige of the stroke.

Handing me a drink, Mr. Herrera propelled me up the lookout mountain, which he also owned. As we seated ourselves on a cement bench carved with Winged Victories, colored beams whipped across the Parthenon's Doric columns.

“Self-activates at dusk,” Mr. Herrera said. “And a hell of a security system, too. Criminals think they've died and gone to heaven up here. Annie tells me you're a businessman.”

I deprecated my backyard nursery.

“Where do you think everyone begins? Look, I must tell you, you're not the first man for Annie, because such are these times. She has made unfortunate attachments. But she is a constant girl. Months go by, she sees no one if a man is unsuitable. So already I'm impressed with you.”

After dinner, as the manservant cleared the table, Annie complimented the meal in Spanish. Nobody responded.

“
Verdad, Ana, y el vino también,”
I said finally.

“Americans speak English,” Mr. Herrera said.

“Yes,” Annie said, “you and Ronald Reagan, you and La Migra, you and the CIA in Nicaragua, you and the Justice Department that sends refugees, Latinos like yourself, home to be killed.”

Mr. Herrera reddened. Two of Annie's sisters, on the far end of the marble dining hall, elaborately flung their napkins onto the floor. “Leave this table,” Mrs. Herrera said.

As Annie snatched up her shawl, Mr. Herrera attempted a wink in my direction, but he was so agitated that his eyelid wouldn't close. He looked as if lemon had squirted his eye. “Wait,” he whispered, commanding with a strong hand on my arm. “If you were my son-in-law, I would have a family stake
investing in your business. You need capital to expand. What are you going to do, put up a circus tent in your backyard?” Smiling with astonishment, I waved around the table and followed Annie to the car, where she sat with chin jutted.

“Of course he's despicable,” I said. “But he loves you so much he's in danger. You have the power to shame his life away.” A surprising love for him tugged at me. Like me he was made over, too new, scrubbed pink like surgically reconstructed skin.

“If I found my grandfather's house in Mexico City,” Annie was saying, “I would creep on my knees like pilgrims at the Basilica. I'd photograph every square foot and make postcards, and send one to my father each day saying, ‘This is your home.'”

At the end of summer school we crossed the border to recover Annie's grandfather, at least his reputation. The violation of my parole gave us both insomnia. Mexico City was a Hollywood disaster movie, a postnuclear epic. In a pall of charred smog we traipsed from government agency to library to newspaper archive. Her grandfather, we learned, had been purged as a Nazi collaborator. The ancestral Herrera home was located in the suburb Pedregal de San Angel, an enclave of multimillion-dollar villas surrounded by massive lava walls. Shanties leaned against them. Old women bent double under loads of bound sticks. Babies slept in boxes. Within, the current occupants toasted us with cocktails and stuffed us with hors d'oeuvres.

Outside, Annie burst into sobs as I held her. Then, shaking free, she raised her arms, slowly, high overhead, and let them slap to her sides.

On the train north she was composed, seductive, peeling fresh mango and popping it in my mouth. Home, she registered at the university. Within two years she had completed an abandoned degree program, student teaching, and certification. She was assigned a fourth grade.

We married. Negotiations surrounded the ceremony. I had not entered a church in a decade and a half, but Mrs. Herrera wanted a religious service; a priest married us in our backyard. Annie demanded a Mexican extravaganza reception. The priest, in a white linen cassock, rope-belted, seemed as alien as a guest lead from
Star Trek
. He was middle-aged handsome, with sharp chin and graying hair, and surprised me with a whistle when Annie and I kissed, closing our vows. It was a beautiful September day, breezes rippling the shadows of leaves over us.

For the reception, the rented ballroom was decked with streamers and paper flowers. While mariachis played on stage, Annie and I drank champagne from the bottle. The dancing began,
el Baile del Dolar
. Mr. Herrera first partnered Annie, who, pliant as a shop dummy, looked woodenly past him. My own family not attending, I engaged Mrs. Herrera, Celia, instead of my mother. Though hippy, she was an effortless bundle, strands of her gray hair flying across my face. At the song's conclusion she knotted a C-note in my bowtie. The next partner, an aunt, tucked a more modest five into my belt. The band repeated “Volver Volver,” dance after dance.

Sprigs of legal tender wound into my hair, protruding from my shoes, pinned into a tail behind me, I blundered into Annie and Mrs. Herrera huddling against the stage.

“
I
have forgiven him,” Mrs. Herrera was saying, forefinger punching her own chest. “How is it your business to go on punishing him?” I drifted away in the arms of a perfumed fourteen-year-old cousin.

And so Mr. Herrera promenaded Annie into the center again, he nimble on small feet, she festooned with gray-green currency bows. His cheeks were split wide with smiling. The last trumpet quaver, she patted his shoulder and kissed his cheek, stood while he hugged her.

True to his word, Mr. Herrera presented me with a choice parcel of B-2, now DesertScapes. Annie and I bought a house.

At her request Annie was transferred to a barrio school. Nightly she treated me to the latest marvels of border Spanglish: “
Oye, K-mart tiene el gran half-price sale de Voltron y los Gobots, esta noche hasta los diez, check it out
…” She bought me season basketball tickets and rubbed linament in my joints, stretched my back and neck. Her facial angularity subsided, lines rounding. Even her movements softened. She settled into furniture like a release of air.

My parole expired. I discontinued therapy. We were complete, my job finished.

Annie's version of the Memorial Day crash: “We hit so hard it knocked the lights out for a second.” The car is totalled, crushed.

In a dream I take my child to the junkies' restaurant.

“Coming along great, Tony,” the waiter fawns. He, like all the employees and clientele, like me, is unremarkable except for the left arm, shrunken and chalky. In the dream it's understood this is the mainlining arm (though I never have shot dope and indeed will not take even aspirin now). The baby is healthy-sized except for its left arm, also withered.