Honored Guest (Vintage Contemporaries) (23 page)

“I think your parents are cute,” June said. “They’re not like Howard’s. Poor Howard.”

“I spent ten to two with them yesterday,” Abby said. “Then I took them to the market and my mother would say about anything, ‘Is this the best price you can give me? Is this the best you can do?’ In English, of course, slowly, in English. Candles, bananas, those tiny bags of confetti, everything … She bought me lightbulbs, she insisted. ‘You have all these dead lightbulbs,’ she said, and I said, ‘Mom, we can buy these in the store, we don’t have to be bargaining for them in the market.’ Then I had to spend six to nine with them too, back at the hotel. And that Parker! He had to run across the cobblestones, and of course he falls down and practically tears off his kneecap. Finally, I cracked. I said, ‘I’ve got to have a day off. I can’t have another meal with you for a while, I just can’t,’ and my father said, ‘We aren’t taking out taxes.’”

June laughed, but then she said, “What did he mean?”

“Maybe he said withholding,” Abby said. “It was a joke. Like I thought it was a job, my being with them.”

“Oh, that’s funny,” June said. “That’s what I mean. They’re not that bad.”

“I can’t believe they adopted that child and then named him Parker,” Abby said. “Where did that name come from? My mother reminded me that I had promised to take him tonight so they could go out to dinner by themselves.”

“When my mother was here and I was with her at the bank?” June said earnestly. “And I was sitting there looking at my mother in line to get money? I had an epiphany.”

“Really,” Abby said.

“It was … my mother will always love me.”

“That’s an epiphany?” Abby said.

“It wasn’t a thought. It was like …” June trailed off. “Your mother will always love you too, forever, no matter what.”

“Isn’t that amazing,” Abby said. “Really, it’s amazing, if it’s true.”

A young Guatemalan boy wearing filthy green shorts with a broken zipper and a Chicago Bulls T-shirt came into the cafe holding three glass Shangri-La bottles by the neck. Then they saw Caroline walking by with her brown long-legged dog on a rope leash.

“Caroline!” they cried together.

She joined them, dragging the dog in with her. He had been neutered not long before, and he had a plastic basket on his head so he wouldn’t rip his stitches out. The stitches should have been taken out by now and the basket removed, but Caroline was putting it off even though the Indians laughed rudely at the sight of them. Neither Abby nor June would have been
capable of walking a dog around town with a basket on its head.

“Can’t we take that off the poor thing?” Abby said.

“I know, I know, but then he bites his fleas,” Caroline said. “I’ve got to give him a bath first.”

The dog smacked the basket against the table leg and lay down with a thump. He was an odd little dog with large dewclaws and a strangely malformed mouth. Caroline had bought him in the market for two quetzales, about thirty-five cents. She took excellent care of him in a somewhat unbalanced way and was always trying to improve him. Caroline was an artist, she had always been an artist, things just came to her sometimes. She was thin, almost ascetic-looking, and had a temper.

Abby continued to look at the dog, at its long fawncolored legs that seemed so breakable. Pets made Abby feel discouraged. In the run-down motel where they all rented rooms by the month, the guardian had an aged, arthritic parrot who was brought out on a stick every morning and left to hobble around on a broken bench beneath some banana trees until dusk. Sometimes June would gently spray him with water from the hose, which seemed to neither distress nor delight him, Abby didn’t know why she bothered. The motel also housed some members of a street band, who were seldom there, and a morose man with a bulging vein in his forehead which appeared to beat incessantly. He made a living from his fortune birds—three yellow canaries in a bamboo cage that would tell your future by selecting a small rolled piece of paper from a pinewood box. The tiny prophets’ names were Profeta, Planeta and Justicio, and they seemed happy and untroubled. The motel was not far from the
parque central
and was next to one of the town’s many ruined cathedrals, the rubble from one
of the cathedral’s walls making up part of the courtyard. The rooms were small, dark and cold, but each had a perfect view of Agua, the most beautiful of the volcanoes.

The Guatemalan child, having been paid for the bottles, was threading his way back through the tables. He paused and gazed beseechingly at June’s pancake, which she had barely touched. Abby had not eaten hers either and was using the plate more or less as an ashtray.

“June,” Caroline said.

June looked at the boy. “Sure, sure,” she said. He plucked up the pancake with slender fingers and hurried outside. He crossed the street and stared at June as he ate.

“Is he scowling at us?” June said. “I mean, what is it exactly one is supposed to do?”

The others would often tease June for being so grave about everything. She wore oversized American clothes, a plaid shirt and brown shorts, and a woven necklace that her mother had bought her during her visit. June had wanted the necklace badly and had led her mother to the store, which was frequently closed, more than once. She affected ragged black and blond hair which she made sticky with shaving cream.

“Imagine him and Parker as playmates,” Caroline said. “Little playmates.”

“That is so radical,” Abby said.

The boy finished the pancake, then turned modestly away from them to urinate.

“Oh, gaaa,” June said.

“My mother is finally beginning to notice the public urination,” Abby said. “‘You know, honey,’ she said, ‘this is a lovely town, but so much public urination goes on. I don’t think I’ve
ever seen so much public urination. You walk through the park and men are urinating behind pieces of cardboard. Boys are urinating on flowers. We went to look at some churches and we were picking our way around the courtyard and an old man was urinating on a pile of sand. When he finished he flapped his hands at us. He scolded us! He said we were not supposed to be in the courtyard, we could only be in the church. He was the ostiary or something, or thought he was …’” Abby was mimicking her mother’s nasal, bemused way of speaking.

“They’re still here, your parents?” Caroline said.

“Oh god, yes,” Abby said. “I have to watch Parker tonight so they can go out. It’s their anniversary.”

“We’ll all watch him,” Caroline said. “We’ll sit around in a circle and blow smoke at him or something. Howard will ask him his opinion of death.”

“That is getting so old,” Abby said. “It’s like an old bar trick or something.”

“Morgan’s been the darlingest,” Caroline said to June. “Don’t you just love her?”

June blushed. “Do you know what my mother told me?” June said. “She told me she had always been emotionally indifferent to my father, from the very first, but now she had found happiness and she hoped that I would find such happiness and never have to spend long years with someone I was emotionally indifferent to.”

“Oh,” Caroline said. “It’s like a little blessing she gave you, isn’t it? That’s so nice.”

“I love watching June blush,” Abby said. “Really, June, you are so funny.”

Then she and Caroline talked about how they wished they
had a car they could share. Then they began talking about how James claimed to have stolen a car in Texas and driven it through Mexico into Guatemala, where he’d sold it for a great deal of money in the capital. This was a difficult, virtually impossible feat and the story had always elicited considerable admiration. James also claimed that once, prior to stealing the car, he had been arrested in California for underage drinking, and that as part of his sentencing he was forced to attend the autopsy of a drunk driver. He described the way they had sawed off the top of the dead man’s head and lifted it like “a lid on a basket.”

“I think he made up that stuff about the cadaver,” Abby said.

“I didn’t believe that for one minute,” Caroline said.

“I don’t know about that car from Texas either,” Abby said. “He’s so enthusiastic about that experience, he probably didn’t have it.”

“What are you thinking, June?” Abby asked.

“I was thinking I have no sense of direction,” June said. “I can’t remember the names of flowers or ruins or saints. And I can’t keep a journal. Any journal I keep sucks.” She was thinking of Edith Holden’s precious Edwardian journal with all the lovely drawings. The one she had in prep school. Edith Holden had died tragically young, drowning in the Thames while collecting horse chestnut buds, the twit.

The bill arrived and June began to go over it painstakingly. “Excuse me, pardon me.
Perdóneme?”
she called to the waitress, “but no one here ordered the
huevos revueltos
.”

“Oh, just pay for it,” Abby said. “All that stuff is fifty cents or something, isn’t it? I’ll pay for it.”

“No, it’s my turn,” June said, counting out some coins.
They then got up with a great scraping of chairs on the ugly tiles.

On the street, the dog strained toward a mound of burnt plastic in the gutter and managed to acquire something repellent before Caroline hauled him away.

“He is so dim,” she said. “I thought fixing him would make him smarter.”

“That is so funny,” Abby said.

They reached the heavy scarred wooden doors of their compound. They pushed them open and Caroline unknotted the rope from the dog’s collar. He leapt into the air and ran around the courtyard three times at remarkable speed before a bougainvillea stump snagged the basket and sent him sprawling. The parrot dropped the piece of mango he’d been toying with and crouched against the gnawed slats of his bench. The parrot’s name was Nevertheless as far as anyone could translate it. The dog didn’t have a name.

The fortune birds were not up yet. Customarily they rested until noon in their cage, beneath a clean dish towel. For them Easter week was one of the biggest weeks of the year. They had told a thousand fortunes. Their director, the man with the staggeringly large vein, was sitting at a card table in a corner of the courtyard writing new fortunes in an elegant script on blue pieces of paper. He wrote swiftly, without reflection or emotion. James and Howard were playing Hacky Sack on the grass with a tiny stitched ball that said
I Jesus
on it. They had bought it from some evangelicals who did massage. The boys had been so dumped the night before, clutching their glasses of
aguardiente
, that they could hardly
^™
find their mouths. Now here they were, sleek and quick.

June blushed when she saw James, for she had drunk a
great deal of
aguardiente
last night as well and recalled asking him, “Do you think I have a personality?”

“No,” he had said.

“A personality,” she persisted.

“Why would you want one? You’re fine.”

“But I should,” June said.

“Look at my wallet,” he said. It was a long leather wallet clipped by a chain to his belt. “There was a whole bin of these at the airport on sale and the merchant said that each wallet had its own personality because it was natural material and the lines and colors and imperfections made each one unique.”

“That’s sick,” June had said.

“Personality is secondary to predicament,” James had said.

She was attracted to James, to his deep-set eyes and perfect skin, but none of them were lovers. That would have spoiled everything. Love was a compromise, they felt. They were not like their parents, who were always in love and who just went on and on with life, changing partners, acquiring new children, abandoning past interests and assuming new ones, always in love with someone or something.

It was almost noon. The boys continued to play Hacky Sack, thrusting out their long feet.

“I’m going to wash the dog,” Caroline announced. “After which we shall remove the basket.” She produced some special soap she had bought at the market. It came in a small box that had the drawing of an insect on it.

“It doesn’t really look like a flea, though,” Abby noted.

“They intended it to look like a flea,” Caroline said confidently.

They captured the dog and poured a bucket of water over
his wiry coat. The soap made a quick brown lather and almost instantly, motionless black fleas appeared.

“Look at those fleas,” Abby said. “They’re enormous.”

“This soap must be lethal,” June said.

The guardian and his family came out to watch the dog being bathed. The parrot watched, too, swaying excitedly. The dog stood passively, his head bent, the basket touching the ground.

They rinsed and scrubbed, then rinsed again. There were fewer fleas at the end but there were never no fleas at all.

“Shouldn’t we have gloves?” June asked.

“The fortune dog,” Caroline said. “Divination by fleas.” She picked them off. “This is not good,” she said. “This is not good. This is not good either.”

Then there was the ceremony of removing the basket, which was attached to the dog’s collar with thick, dirty tape. Finally the basket was wrenched off. The dog’s head looked somewhat smaller than anyone remembered.

“He really is unsatisfactory, isn’t he?” Caroline said. “Maybe if I straightened his tail. He needs something. What do you think, June?”

“Maybe a bandanna,” June said.

“Oh, I hate bandannas on dogs,” Caroline said. “The vet said he had too many teeth in his mouth. A couple of them should be pulled. And see all those warts on his head? They keep growing back.”

The dog squatted on his haunches and stared at them. He had probably never been meant for this life. He was just not consubstantial with this life.

One of the reasons Caroline had acquired the dog was to
practice concern. They all felt that sometimes it was necessary to practice the more subtle emotions.

The dog suddenly widened his eyes as though in delighted recall, shot up and sideways and danced away to his favorite spot in the compound, the smoldering refuse pile in one of the stalls that once stabled horses, rooting about for only an instant before finding something ragged and foul which he settled down to eat. At the same time, the owner of the fortune birds capped his pen, rose from his chair, rolled his shoulders, crouched slightly to fart and removed the cloth from the little birds’ cage. Immediately the birds began to sing.