The Juliet Stories (6 page)

“Juliet,” says the teacher. “Juliet, sit down. Now.”

She has managed to be last, and those same students turn at their desks and stare with cool appraisal. I had lots of friends back home! Juliet imagines shouting at them. It is true, but it does not matter. She can’t pick up who she was before and by force carry her across the barrier of stranger.

For phys ed, Juliet’s class is herded down to a spacious green playing field, immaculately maintained, where they are split into separate groups of boys and girls. The girls shed uniforms inside a concrete building at the far end of the field. The room is crowded; slits for light are cut into the walls at the top. Juliet wears a poor facsimile of the school’s uniform: lime-green skirt instead of navy; white T-shirt standing in for a buttoned blouse, the ironed-on insignia peeling off. She doesn’t care but the other girls do, and she understands that she is supposed to too. Not caring makes her even more of a stranger. But if she cared, she couldn’t bear to come to school in the wrong uniform, and she has no choice: there is a lag time between letters to Grandma Grace and packages in reply, and she is still waiting for navy, and for buttons.

On the shining grass, Juliet runs fastest, jumps farthest, throws like a boy, but her talents are themselves humiliating, inappropriate. Girls don’t try; girls don’t sweat.

Back in the change room, Juliet searches the floor and under the bench, but she can’t find Grandma Grace’s gift. Hoarsely, in English, she whispers, “Has anyone seen my green barrettes?”

“Has anyone seen my green barrettes?” mimics the girl sitting next to her, dark thigh exposed beneath pink lace panties, and the phrase is repeated, voices rollicking off concrete walls, disappearing into Spanish, which the other girls speak when not in the classroom, where they are required to use English.

She doesn’t care, but the teacher does. “Your hair is a mess.” The fault is Juliet’s. Explanations are worse than useless, holes dug in quicksand, speeding her descent.

But when she lays her cheek against the cool plastic bus seat, hair blowing loose in the wind, she is already on the mend. Mercifully, Juliet and Keith are dispensed outside their fence. They clank through the gate, shuffling their running shoes, tossing their backpacks. It is one o’clock, and the rest of the day remains openly, lusciously theirs.

Today the main room of their house hums with volunteers and religion, cigarettes crunched out in clay ashtrays. From a prayer circle on the floor, Gloria rises and greets them with a handful of coins. “Go and buy yourselves a snack. And take Emmanuel.”

The afternoon wants them. Emmanuel is a troublesome pet cajoled and soothed by bribery. The coins are enough for crackers and
crema
at a little
tienda
behind their house, not the one with the jam. At almost every house something is for sale: tortillas, or beer, or eggs. The woman at the window peels a ripe mango and passes the pit through the window for Emmanuel to suck on. It is shady in this yard, comfortable with the murmuring cluck of hens, and Juliet and Keith squat on their heels and squeeze the sweet, salty
crema
onto damp white crackers.

“I hate school,” says Juliet.

Keith doesn’t have to say anything.

“They stole my green barrettes,” she says. “At least, I think so. Maybe I lost them. Maybe they fell under the benches or something. I don’t know.”

Keith says, “I’m thirsty.”

They crave shaved ice drizzled with syrup, sold from the dripping wooden cart that is often at the park. They debate, on their way, the best flavour and the likelihood of finding the cart, and they are almost there before they realize something is missing: Emmanuel. It is too awful to consider him forgotten in the shaded yard, sucking on a mango pit, tended by hens. Juliet blames Keith, who knows their mother will blame Juliet, who is the next thing to hysterical when they are found, as they run down the street, by some children, one of whom holds Emmanuel in her arms. He isn’t crying or scared or sad. The girl hops him on her hip; she is lean, her skirt dark, hair carefully brushed; no taller than Juliet, but older. Breasts under her white blouse.

“
Pobrecito
,” she coos to Emmanuel, continuing to cradle him as they walk together. “
Gordito. Papacito. Muñequito
.”

She knows them, but they don’t recognize her until she steps into context, through the Roots of Justice guesthouse gate and around the back to the kitchen, where the cook greets them with an energy that could be mistaken for anger. The girl is the cook’s daughter; the anger, fierce kindness fired by exhaustion.

Out, out, out
, the cook whisks the children away from the tiny, sweltering kitchen into the yard. But in a moment she carries out three tall plastic cups filled with sweet, watery milk flavoured with cocoa and thickened with pounded corn — 
tiste
. The plastic is rubbery and pliant between the teeth. The corn sifts like sediment to the bottom and whirls amongst melting ice cubes: sand and rocks. Juliet and Keith sit on cement blocks in the damp yard, and the cook’s daughter, whose name they now know is Marta, sits on her heels and shares her drink with Emmanuel. Neighbourhood children wait outside the gate, but as the skies darken they begin to drift.

The rainy season is upon them, humidity standing amongst thick greens and fat fruits, clouds filling up with warm rain that wants to pour before suppertime, washing the world briefly clean again: the blessed moment before wet turns to steam.

The cook says that the Friesen children must go home too. The guesthouse is empty now, but soon it will be full of Americans, a new delegation arriving to stay. Her daughter Marta needs to help: Food for many tonight! Juliet understands by inclination, by tilting her head and listening without her ears, but Keith understands every word and replies in Spanish. Thank you for the
bebidas
.

Something special for your supper, the cook promises. That means the Friesen children will eat at the guesthouse tonight, and not in a restaurant or around their own kitchen table, where sometimes they share meals with their mother and their father, though more often, lately, with their mother only.

———

Gloria is glad to get out of the house. She makes Juliet and Keith wash their faces and she scrubs Emmanuel’s until he howls (Juliet thinks there is some correlation between howling and cleanliness, some invisible rule that her mother follows: only through misery shalt thou be made clean). Gloria herself is wearing lipstick and mascara. Juliet watches her in the bathroom mirror.

“There,” says Gloria to her reflection, and smacks her lips together.

The rain has stopped and the air sticks to the skin. Gloria hustles the children down the sidewalk to the guesthouse, only to find they’ve arrived early. Supper is not ready. The guesthouse has not expanded to accept the fourteen newcomers and their oversized luggage; it has contracted, and the atmosphere tingles with nerves and confusion and mile-long questions.

Grown-ups crowd the porch, clutching plastic cups of water or — for the braver among them — of
tiste
.

Juliet swims like a fish into the volunteers’ bedroom: empty. She climbs up to Charlotte’s bunk and sits on the mattress in the dark.
Snooping
. If she were caught, that’s what it would be called. She sniffs the candles, digs her forearms into the pillow and bumps against the little black book. Her fingers travel inside its pages, exposing pencilled naked bodies in parts and whole, carefully drawn bones and muscles, and scattered words that come apart at the seams:
What if freedom calls for anger and not love? Transpose your life. Sunday drive. Here is the skyline; here is the shore; my body and yours, nothing more. Don’t think, create.

Juliet startles as someone bumps into the room in error. Blinking up at her from the doorway: “Is this the bathroom?”

“No.”

“Oh.”

Perhaps the person cannot see that Juliet is a child; perhaps her eyes have not adjusted to the dim. The woman looks half-blind behind owlish glasses, and terrified, as if a bomb might fall from the sky upon her head at any moment. She is waiting for Juliet to give her some direction. She is one of the fourteen newcomers: protestors from Ohio, all of them milling about, stumbling over backpacks and guitar cases, and quite shocked to discover only one toilet in the house.

DO NOT FLUSH TOILET PAPER
, reads the sign on the wall, but someone will, guaranteed.

“It’s by the kitchen,” Juliet says at last.

“Thank you, dear.”

Backing down the metal ladder, Juliet leans and places her face upon the pillow, brushing it lightly with her nose. She inhales Charlotte.

She finds Keith on the porch, where he is alone — temporarily. Certain delegates make a beeline for children; others are oblivious to their existence. All possess a similar look upon entering their new tropical reality, regardless of sex or age: dazed, sweat beading above upper lips, swamped armpits, furry legs, socks with sandals, insistent bellies beneath green T-shirts.

Now one approaches and bends to asks the usual questions, which the children consider scarcely worthy of reply. How old are you? Do you go to school? Do you speak Spanish?

Juliet fakes a Nicaraguan accent; she has practised while gazing into the bathroom mirror at home. Keith doesn’t need to fake anything: his Spanish is streetwise and quick and impresses the man, whom the children nickname Old Yeller, after his teeth.

Few of the delegates speak Spanish. They are in the country for only two weeks, reliant on translators, on Bram and the other volunteers, their visas approved by the Sandinista government. They will be driven to the countryside, to the edges of the war zone, where they will mill about on co-operative farms and at health clinics, much as they do now.

It is time to eat at last.

Everyone gathers in the main room around tables pushed together and draped in plastic. Bram blesses the meal with a brevity that reminds everyone that children are present. The cook takes her cue and produces, with a flourish, a feast sourced by ingenious means: one whole fish for each guest, cleaned and roasted with head intact, served on a plastic plate with a single ring of fried onion decorating its browned and crusty upward-staring side.

But the tallest, skinniest, palest pair of people Juliet and Keith have ever seen recoil in horror: they are vegans. The Ghost Twins. (Even after they are revealed to be husband and wife, Juliet and Keith think of them as a weirdly fused brother and sister.)

In a flash, Marta, the cook’s daughter, removes the offending offering. “We don’t want to make a fuss,” the Ghost Twins say, “but there is such a thing as cross-contamination. What are the beans fried in? Is there butter on the vegetables?”

Bram assures them that all is well and unbuttered, but he may or may not be telling the truth. This is not the kind of disturbance that troubles him.

Gloria says, “The cabbage salad is dressed with lemon and salt. You must try it.”

The Ghost Twins are a threat only to themselves. They cannot spoil the air of celebration that attends this occasion.

After the meal, Gloria tunes a guitar and suggestions are called out, voices join in. Emmanuel drums on his plate with his spoon. When finally he dissolves, he is plucked up by Charlotte and danced onto the porch, where the liquid air stands still.

The heat in the room expands: everyone wears it. Bare bulbs swing drunkenly, tossing wild shadows onto bright turquoise walls.

Juliet and Keith and Emmanuel are rarities in a closed world. How easily Juliet has adapted to the dangers and privileges: sneaking under the drifting blue haze of cigarette smoke, picking her way through the forest of adult limbs, catching scenes like pictures unfolded, words snagged, bedtime avoided. She steps off the porch beyond the ring of light. Against her shoulder blades the rough concrete wall is cool. The night breathes, alive — 
there
 — she can hear its breath: a soft moan like a knife carving a cut between her ribs. Juliet scans the darkness, traces a three-headed figure entangled beside chain-link fencing, bodies connected, swaying in unison. In this light, at this hour, in this place, she believes she is seeing a mythical creature, a figure of magic.

The screen door at the back of the house bangs open, shedding a gash of light: Marta tosses a pan of dirty water at the bushes. The screen door slams shut. Juliet kneels and finds against her toe a perfectly smooth mango; its thick skin gives way under her thumb, holding the shape of her print.

“Hey, you.” Charlotte stops, barefoot in the shadows. “What have you found?” Emmanuel holds two fists of her dark hair. Juliet turns, but no one stands beside the fence. Charlotte waits patiently for her reply.

“I found a mango,” says Juliet.

“Anything else?”

Juliet holds it out. “I hate school.”

“Do you?” Charlotte lifts the mango to her nose and inhales the scent of ripeness and sweetness before returning it to Juliet’s open palm. The fruit’s skin opens along a hairline crack, leaking sticky juice.

“Someone stole my green barrettes today.”

“That’s not right,” says Charlotte.

“I know. But I don’t care. Not really.”

Charlotte’s free hand rises to Juliet’s head, fingers stroking hair and scalp, pulling from Juliet a shiver of pleasure so fine it is a thread of pure gold drawing up her spine.

“There she is — there you are. Your mother’s looking for you. Time to go home.” Bram materializes out of blackness and looks down at Juliet. He takes Emmanuel, who won’t let go of Charlotte’s hair. The three of them are stuck together as if tied with rope. Bram and Charlotte laugh.

“Let me keep him,” says Charlotte. “He’ll be mine.”

Juliet can hear her mother through an open window. She does not sound like a woman who is looking for her children. She is playing and singing, and she would play and sing until dawn, given an audience.

Inside, Keith guzzles a glass of milk by the kitchen door, watched by the cook, who pets his black hair. Marta beckons Juliet into the kitchen: she has a puppy, almost newborn, and she lets Juliet press it, trembling and frightened, against her heart, tiny black nose cold under her chin, teeth like needles in her skin.