Still Life with Plums (15 page)

Janine stands in front of the yellow porch light so I cannot see her face. As I get into the cab she trickles a stream of white cement words across the yard. “Good luck in Albuquerque, Ed.”

“Albuquerque,” I say. But in my mind I am already pulling up my collar to the contentment of Seattle rain, with long days of nothing but deep-fisted pockets and the lapping of wave after wave after wave.

Lucky Baby snatches
The Tormenta Falls Herald
from her husband’s grip. “Let me see!” she says, peeling off the rubber band, frantically flipping pages with pudgy ink-stained fingers until she knocks her orange juice into her Cheerios.

“Calm down,” Joe says, mopping up the mess with the dish towel tucked into his Wranglers. “It’ll be in there.”

“I know it will,” she snipes, tossing out the sports section, classifieds, comics, until she finds the local and scans page one, two, three. “Here it is!” she shouts, folding the paper to highlight the 4 × 4 column announcement that reads:
Lucky Baby Turns 58! Happy Birthday to our Cowboy Bob Show Girl!
Beside it is a grainy halftone of Lucky Baby and Cowboy Bob taken in 1947 when she was just five years old. Cowboy Bob squats beside her, ten-gallon hat perched way back on his head to expose the golden forelock—his TV trademark. He poses cheek-to-cheek with Lucky Baby who sports slick black ponytails.

Baby hugs the paper to her chest. “They remembered,” she coos, squeezing her eyes shut, little lower lip quivering.

“Course they did,” Joe says, patting his wife’s hair, the shiny black
ball of it knotted at the base of her neck, the half-inch silver roots that will be touched up this morning.

“I wish they used the other picture, though,” she says, referring to the one taken during her second season, sitting on top of the Steinway, little Mary Jane’s gleaming, frilly dress flouncing over a scratchy slip. Her head tipped to the side. That was her pose, the one she’d angle into after she and Cowboy Bob crooned “The Yellow Rose of Texas” into each other’s eyes at the end of each show. That way the home audience could see the genuine affection between their local celebrity and the darling girl rescued from Crystal City, the Internment Camp built twenty miles west to hold German-Italian-Japanese Americans, and German-Italian-Japanese
Latin
Americans. The latter—JLAs, like Baby’s family, shipped up by their Central and South American governments at the United States’ request.

But Lucky Baby isn’t concerned with all that. She has brisket to marinate, jumbo shrimp to peel, potatoes to mash for her birthday supper not ten hours away.

“Did you call about the cake?” she asks.

Joe sets a fresh bowl of cereal before her. “Course I did. And remember, when everyone gets here, don’t say anything about the—”

“I won’t,” Baby says.

“Not a peep to your beauty parlor gals either.”

“I
won’t,”
Baby says. “Though I don’t know what’s the big deal.”

“People get jealous over less,” he says, handing her a vitamin. “Now swallow this.”

Joe pushes open the door to Lila’s Beauty Spot, tarnished bell over the door tinkling as Lucky Baby sidles in. “Happy Birthday!” Lila calls from the third chair.

“Happy birthday!” yodels Bettyanne, another regular, from under the dryer, tags of foil crimped into her hair flapping under the heat.

Lila points to an assortment of bottles and tubes. “I’ve got everything ready,” she says, patting the chair with a trembly, liver-spotted hand. At seventy-seven, Lila shouldn’t hold a scissors to anyone’s head.

Lucky Baby slides up into #3, her feet barely touching the floor.

“I’ll be back in an hour,” Joe says, backing out the door.

“Don’t forget to pick up the ice cream!” Baby calls.

“I won’t,” Joe says, the door shutting behind him.

“Or the candles!”

“Got it,” Joe mouths through the glass. He clicks an imaginary lock over his lips for secrecy, and then he is gone.

Baby pulls a tissue from her bra and wipes the back of her neck. “It’s like a sauna out there,” she says. “I wish to God it would rain.”

“You and me both,” Lila says. She fastens a vinyl cape around Baby’s neck and starts combing, yanking at uncooperative tangles.

“Ow!” Baby says, and “Jeez!”

“Sorry,” says Lila. “I’m a little nervous. I want your hair to look perfect for your sisters’ visit. Got everything ready?”

“Almost,” Baby says, mentally checking off her To-Do list, staring at advertising posters taped to the wall. Girls with crew cuts. Boys with frosted hair. When did men get so prissy, she wonders. Not like her Joe who still Brylcreems his hair every morning before snapping on his shirt. His skin leathery from all those years of wildcatting. Oh, the stories he has told her about drilling oil wells in Alaska and the Gulf of Mexico and Saudi Arabia. But he is more than just muscles. He is book smart, too, and she married him just in time so he could make sense of all the legal forms Baby got in the mail during the initial redress campaign in 1988. She certainly couldn’t decipher all those pages of USE BLACK INK ONLY, SIGN ON THIS LINE, INITIAL HERE. Twelve years later Joe’s knowledge is coming in handy again. That’s devotion, Baby thinks and then she reminds herself to keep quiet, don’t utter a word.

“I know you’ll be glad to see Isabel,” Lila says about Baby’s middle sister. “But I never thought Carmen would set foot on Texas soil again.”

Baby nibbles the inside of her cheek. “Me either.”

“Course who could blame her,” Lila says, eyes rolling up to the ceiling, rewinding the years. “I remember when Crystal City was built,” she says, and Baby settles in for the spiel she’s heard a million times. “How it was supposed to be top secret hush-hush, but Daddy drove the whole family over one Saturday and parked as close as he could get. We sat in the car and listened to hammering and sawing, saw towers and barracks being built, rolls of barbed wire. Daddy shook his head and said:
Hysteria. Everybody’s got the hysteria.”

“Yep,” Baby says, but she stopped listening. She’s reconsidering her outfit for tonight: shorts or skirt. Spaghetti straps or sleeves.

“Wonder why Carmen’s coming back now?”

“I don’t know,” Baby says.

Baby looks in the mirror and frowns at the fan of wrinkles around her eyes, the sagging jowls. In her mind she’s still the porcelain-skinned doll doting mothers dressed their Caucasian daughters up to look like. Now she’s an old woman, but Carmen is fourteen years older. Seventy-two. They haven’t seen each other in fifty-four years. Not in person, anyway. Baby has seen snapshots sent from Los Angeles where Carmen and Isabel moved after the war. Carmen and Isabel standing up to their knees in the Pacific Ocean. Wearing Mickey Mouse ears at Disneyland. Dressed in kimonos at some Japanese tea house. Baby wondered why they wanted to do a thing like that. They were born in Peru, for God’s sake. Their first language was Spanish. But there they were, holding up tiny tea cups like they’d been doing it their entire lives. And they did look authentic with their heavy lidded eyes and coifed, charcoal hair. Now Carmen is coming, probably to talk her ear off about redress and retribution and the upcoming
Day of Remembrance, the anniversary of FDR’s Executive Order 9066 which ultimately sent thousands of Japanese Americans and JLAs to internment camps.

That’s ancient history as far as Baby is concerned. She is an American, born on Texas soil in the Crystal City hospital to a mother who didn’t survive the delivery. Raised in Tormenta Falls, a close-knit town that claimed her as their very own poster child of goodwill. They would show the world something about Texas manners, about hospitality and forgiveness.

“I’m nervous,” Baby says aloud though she didn’t mean to.

Lila parts Baby’s hair and squirts on dye. “About seeing Carmen? What for?”

Baby opens her mouth but the words won’t come, and she doesn’t trust her rusty memories. She has to rely on stories told during Isabel’s yearly visits about how Carmen wanted to take Lucky Baby away from Cowboy Bob, from Tormenta Falls, from smiling crowds and photographers who yelled: “Say cheese!” at grocery store and car lot openings.

But Lucky Baby didn’t want to move to the west coast with her frowning older sister in her sad black dress. She wanted to live with Joan and Wally Adkins, a solid Baptist couple who opened their arms to Lucky Baby and gave her her very own room and a closet full of starched gingham dresses.

“Have you heard from Cowboy Bob?” Bettyanne calls from under the dryer.

“I will. Probably in today’s mail. He hasn’t missed a birthday or Christmas yet.”

“How’s he like Florida?” Lila asks.

“He loves it,” Baby says. It’s a guess. He never signs anything but his name though his signature markedly changed decades back, an
anomaly Baby attributes to rheumy eyes or medication or the tremor of old age.

The bell over the door sounds and in bursts two tow-headed boys followed by Emily Crockett, looking wilted from the record-breaking temperature. “Don’t run!” she screams at her visiting grandsons, her shrill voice piercing Baby’s eardrums. “Go sit in those chairs and keep still!” Emily clips across the linoleum in her sling-back shoes, ankles thick from edema.

Lila frowns at the daisy wall clock. “Birtie’s running late this morning, but I’m sure she’ll be in shortly for your wash and set.”

“No hurry.” Emily tugs a lavender envelope from her purse and offers it to Baby. “I got you a card.”

Baby pulls her hand out from under the vinyl cloak. “Thank you,” she says, eyes glistening.

The two boys fidget and wrestle in the chairs until the chubby one pops up and runs to Lucky Baby.

“Are you her?” he asks.

“What?” Baby says.

“From the TV. Grandma told us we might see a celebrity today.”

Baby sits up straighter and cocks her head to the side, smiling. “Yes I am.”

The boy puffs out his cheeks and peels: “Tanjoubi omedetou!”

Baby scrunches her eyebrows. “Pardon?”

“Tanjoubi omedetou!” he repeats. “Happy birthday in Japanese. I looked it up on the Internet.”

Lila’s and Bettyanne’s eyeballs meet as Baby pulls her mouth into a tight line. “I don’t speak Japanese.”

“But Grandma said you were—”

Emily grabs his forearm. “Hush up, now.”

“But you said she was—”

“Never mind what I said,” Emily scolds, yanking him to the door. “Come on Wayne,” she says to the other boy. “We’ll come back when Bertie is in,” Emily says, face crimson, and the door hisses closed behind them.

Baby’s jugular pulses on the side of her neck. “I speak English,” she says.

“I know,” Lila says, frantically globbing on dye.

At 4:45 Baby taps the lime Jell-O mold from its ring. “The grapes sunk to the bottom again,” she says. “And the pecans.”

Joe pulls his barbeque tongs from under the sink. “Nobody’ll notice.”

“How are you supposed to keep them from sinking, huh? I’d like to know that.” Baby jabs the sad gelatinous blob. “Did you check the mail again?”

“Yes,” Joe says. “It’s still not here.”

“It’s never been this late before. You think something happened?”

“People get sick. Trucks break down.”

“Then they get a new truck, a substitute driver. Don’t they know people need their mail? People rely on their mail?”

Baby bangs her foot against the dishwasher just as a car turns into the driveway. “It’s them,” Baby says, foot frozen.

“Sounds like,” says Joe. Suddenly both break into a run to peer out the front window. Isabel is behind the wheel and Baby strains to make out the figure in the passenger seat. There she is. Carmen. The door opens and she slides out, looking so fragile in her gauzy yellow dress with saucer-sized flowers embroidered around the hem. Red handbag over one shoulder. Navy blue Keds. Her hair is silver white, cut short-short, making her neck look so thin, too thin to hold up the three-inch half moon earrings dangling from her lobes.

“Not what I expected,” Baby says.

“What’d you expect?”

“Not that,” Baby says.

Baby watches Carmen stretch from side to side, undoubtedly stiff from the long trip. She refuses to fly since that turbulent trip she made to visit their brother in Nagasaki last year.

Joe straightens Baby’s collar and wipes a lipstick smudge from her cheek. “Remember,” he says, “not a word.”

“Right,” Baby says, her eyes fastened on Carmen who, though no longer in a sad black dress, still wears a prominent frown.

Baby opens the front door. “You made it!” she calls, overly chipper.

“Finally,” Isabel says, flapping her shirt to let air in.

“Dios mío,” Carmen says. “Hace mucho calor aquí.”

“Sí,” Isabel says, fanning her face with a road map.

“Un horno,” Carmen adds, looking at Baby as though she is responsible for the weather.

Isabel walks to Baby, arms wide for a hug. She looks good, Baby thinks, in her scooter skirt and sandals, permed hair. Still so youthful and thin at 68. Baby runs a hand over her own bulging belly, self-conscious.

“It’s good to see you,” Isabel says. “You too, Joe,” she adds, offering him a hug.

Joe pats her on the back. “How was the trip?”

Isabel rolls her eyes. “Thirty hours in a car in this heat wave. You tell me.”

“I told you to fly,” Carmen says. “I could have taken the train.” Carmen turns her eye on Baby, who edges behind her husband.

“Let me see you,” Carmen directs.

Baby comes forward and they stand face to face, eyes locked, not knowing whether to hug or shake hands.

“This is our Baby,” Isabel says. “Didn’t she turn out fine?”

“Sí,” Carmen nods, steely-eyed. The three sisters stand in an uncomfortable
ring and Baby wonders how they will possibly survive this visit. Sweat trickles down her back and she searches for something, anything, to say.

“Well let’s get you all settled,” Joe finally says, escorting the ladies inside.

Joe hauls the suitcases to the spare room as the women gravitate to the fireplace—the mantle and paneled wall covered with Cowboy Bob Show memorabilia: photos and newspaper clippings, a tiny dress on a hanger, a bronzed pair of size four Mary Jane’s, a golden statue that reads: Best Local Children’s Show, 1950. Baby steps back to let her sisters take it all in.