The Woman in Oil Fields Read online

  Insults to the body.

  The woman closed her eyes. The hatred and suspicions that characterize put-downs had begun to hit too close to home. I thanked her for speaking to me.

  ______

  I followed Kelly’s wishes and stayed away from the Casa. Most days I worked at the press or just drove around. One afternoon I went to the Shamrock Six, Houston’s worst movie theater, and bought a ticket to a movie called Hollywood Student Hookers. I never knew, in advance, what was playing at the Shamrock, or what time the films started. I came to watch the audience: predominantly black, several generations bunched together in the seats – Great-grandad in the middle, Mom and Dad, festive kids spilling ice on the floor. Everyone talked to the screen.

  “Don’t go in there you fool, he waitin’ for you!”

  “Now you gonna get it.”

  “Yo ass be grass.”

  A circus of insults.’

  Hollywood Student Hookers had been playing for half an hour. I took a sticky seat. A woman shot a man in the face.

  “I tol’ you, sucker,” someone yelled at the screen.

  I sat through two showings of the film, greatly enjoying the crowd. Afterwards I swung by Prince’s for shakes to take to the girls.

  Twice a week I babysat Monica and Kate while Kelly tutored her English students. One day I took them to the “Orange Show” on Houston’s east side. That retired postman I’d interviewed had built a monument there to his favorite fruit, using scraps, pieces of farm equipment, and masonry tile. Winding metal staircases, red umbrellas, Texas flags. Stages for music and puppets. I loved to see the girls in my car, the way they sank into the seats like little dolls. Before we’d got in the Beast for this trip, Monica had cut the side of her foot on a sliver of glass in the street. Kleenex and tears.

  “George, I’m bleeding on my shoe.”

  “It’s all right, honey. Press down with the Kleenex.”

  Kate shot passing cars with a straw. “Our daddy was supposed to call us last night but he didn’t,” she said. She liked to comb the Chrysler’s goatskin seats.

  “George, I can’t walk!”

  “When we get there we’ll get you a piece of ice to put on it.”

  Ten minutes later she was running up and down the metal stairs. It was late afternoon, with a full moon low in the sky.

  Watching the puppets, Kate leaned her small body against my back, resting her head on my shoulder, asking questions about the action onstage.

  “What’s that clown doing?”

  “Reading.”

  “Reading what?”

  “A letter from someone very far away.”

  “Farther than the end of the street?”

  “Yes.”

  “Farther away than the moon?”

  “Just about.”

  “Oh,” she said, twisting around into my arms. “When will my daddy call?”

  “I don’t know, Kate.” Kelly’s ex was a traffic engineer in San Diego.

  “I go see him in the summer.”

  “I know.”

  “We go swimming.” She crawled off my lap. I showed her the evening star.

  ______

  In the next three weeks, fourteen Salvadorans, eight Mexicans, and a Guatemalan boy were arrested at the Casa, on charges ranging from burglary and smuggling to possession of illegal substances. Casa Romero was ordered closed, its furniture impounded. Deportation proceedings began against nine of the Latins.

  “I’m going to Arizona,” Kelly told me one day soon after.

  “What’s in Arizona?”

  “Harry has some friends there who’re setting up a shelter. Desert community. Sympathetic to the cause.”

  I touched her knee. “Are there freeways in Arizona? I’m not happy unless I’m on a freeway.”

  “I know.” She smiled sadly.

  “You’re sure?”

  “Yes. I want to do this.”

  “I’ll miss you,” I told her, stunned.

  “Me too.” She tried not to cry. “You’re a real good talker, George.”

  ______

  Driving through the barrios, gazing at graffiti on old city walls: U.S. OUT OF GUATEMALA, U.S. OUT OF WESTERN EUROPE, U.S. OUT OF NORTH AMERICA.

  A kid on a bike shot me the finger, out of the blue. I laughed. How could I leave this place, this seething gumbo of spicy, bad behavior? Houston was more than just the city in which I lived. It was a spot whose intricate culture, whose social codes I’d cracked.

  I called Kelly from a pay phone and told her I’d live on Fritos if she left. “I’ll waste away …”

  “You’re being deliberately cruel,” she said. “Come with me.”

  “What would I do in Arizona?”

  “Open another press. Write books. I don’t know, George.”

  “You think I don’t have a life here, is that it?”

  “It’s certainly not a life you can’t improve on, is it? Is it?” she said. “Look at the hours you keep. The crap you eat. Here’s a chance to start over, to lead an intelligent –”

  “Intelligence has nothing to do with it,” I said.

  ______

  When I thought about my children, I imagined them in ten-pound, double-ply fertilizer sacks at the back of the garage. If I talked Jean into having them – a boy and a girl – I’d cut the baling wire and let them out.

  “You’re late,” she said. I’d been driving around all day. My eyes were swollen from crying. “Supper’s in the fridge. Where’ve you been?”

  “Running errands.”

  She’d been working on her computer. “George?”

  “Yes?”

  “How worried should I be?”

  “What about?” I put my hands on her shoulders from behind. She touched my fingers. “I don’t know,” I said.

  She turned the desk lamp away from her face. “When I got married the first time, my husband and I seemed perfectly matched,” she said. “Emotionally, intellectually, temperamentally. Our goals were the same. We each wanted a nice house, dinner parties on the patio. But right after Roy was born I felt this desire to go back to school. I couldn’t understand it. I’d never been ambitious for a career. What had changed?”

  She placed her elbows on the desk. “Now I think people get married for very specific reasons. Roger wanted someone to arrange his social life. I wanted a child. Beyond those things we had nothing to build on. I guess I’m not sure marriage is functional after a certain point. It has a half-life of maybe five years.”

  “What did you need from me?” I asked.

  “I wanted to feel sexy again.”

  I kissed the back of her neck.

  “Do you know what quarks are?” she said.

  “Subatomic particles, right?”

  “Do you know where the word comes from? Finnegan’s Wake. Guy who named them thought it was a nice-sounding nonsense word Joyce made up. Turns out, in German ‘Oliark’ means something like ‘cottage cheese.’” She turned off the lamp. “I can’t seem to make sense of –”

  “Shhh.”

  Crying softly against my shoulder.

  ______

  Kelly was leaving on Saturday night. “It’s crazy to cross Texas in the heat,” she said.

  I touched her chin. “You have the smoothest skin …”

  “We’ll leave around nine, from the house. I hope you’re there.”

  I squeezed her hands.

  “You won’t be, will you?”

  I didn’t say anything. She kissed my cheek.

  Saturday afternoon I drove for hours in the Beast, into the piney woods then south along the NASA road. I felt as groundless as an astronaut reeling in a dizzying orbit.

  Around six I stopped at a place I knew called Grady’s and ordered a chicken-fried steak. On the bar TV the Mets were thrashing the Astros. I ordered a pitcher of beer. When the baseball game was over I played a little pool, threw some darts. Bought another pitcher.

  ______

  Ten-twenty. My stomach tightened. Yo
u asshole, I thought. Maybe she’d waited. I could leave all my clothes … buy a pair of shorts down the road.

  I was kidding myself. My mind had been set all along.

  Mike, the bartender, said, “Rack ‘em up, George. I’ll give you a lesson in eight ball.”

  I rubbed my eyes. Stood. Swayed. Jean would wonder where I was if I didn’t phone soon. “All right,” I said. Mike put a quarter in the table and the balls fell out: a thunderous boom.

  “You break,” Mike said.

  “Sure.”

  We squared off across the room. Too much beer. The table swirled. Solids, stripes, slats in the floor, golden bottles, canned laughter from the television speaker. Mike shuffled his feet, waiting for me to start. “George?” he said. I chalked my cue, gazed at the tip. Bright blue dust rose into the air, shimmied, filtered down onto the smooth green table-carpet .

  I remembered telling the girls stories at night to get them to sleep. I remembered sitting with them on the porch at Casa Romero talking to a young Salvadoran woman. Above us, cicadas caromed off the eaves. “They get in,” the woman said, proud of her English, “when you open the door.” I remembered trick-or-treating – Monica dressed as Madonna, singing “Like a Virgin,” Kate wearing an Albert Einstein mask. She gripped my hand. “It was the scariest one in the store,” she said.

  ASSAILABLE CHARACTER

  Six months before my daughter Jessie was born I found a Japanese Bobtail crouched under the still-warm engine of a red Ford Galaxy. I’m partial to just-parked cars – the soft ticking of their motors as they cool, the waves of heat, the freshly pressured rubber hoses. On any given night I can spot the warmest, snuggest automobile in my neighborhood and nearly always find a cat there, purring, trying to force its way up inside the transmission. The night I found Meckie I was roaming the streets of Bowling Green, Ohio, looking for cats with more than five toes on each foot. My wife Susan was finishing her political science degree at a local university; I was teaching a high school biology class and researching a mutant gene called polydactyl, which can produce as many as eight toes per paw. For some reason, 15 percent of the cats in Boston, Massachusetts have extra toes. While Susan huffed and groaned with the weight of her pregnancy I furiously wrote grant proposals for funding to Boston and to Nova Scotia, where evidence suggests the odd gene may have originated.

  The wind gets spooky in Bowling Green in late October. It carries a chill from Lake Erie and a scent of oil and steam, but brackish somehow, as if from sunken ships. I was always hungry in those days: since the middle of her second month Susan had refused to shop or cook. She’d developed a taste for pickled okra, a particular brand from Texas. She sat in front of the television taking little bites out of the jar, tossing the hard stem ends into a shoebox she’d set by her chair for that purpose. I didn’t mind quick trips to the store or kitchen duty, but I didn’t keep a regular schedule. Most evenings I’d just heat some frozen eggrolls for dinner. “If you’re going out, bring home a bottle of peanut oil,” Susan called one night as I left the house with my pockets full of cat chow. “Or some Cheez Whiz. I’d I like to try it on my okra.”

  I walked to a nearby corner grocery and saw the red Galaxy parked in front. I’d never been beneath a Galaxy. Spitfires were my favorite – a good seven inches between the engine block and the ground. Delta 88s weren’t bad, either. I heard a plaintive whine and bent to look. A black and white kitten. She didn’t want to leave the metal’s warmth; she’d backed herself up to the right front tire and was sharpening her claws on the axle. I lay beneath the bumper with her, cozy, out of the wind. The owner of the car came out and chased us both down the road.

  On the way home the kitten slapped my ankles, snagging one of my socks. I named her Meckie after Mack the Knife in The Threepenny Opera. Her claws were like blades. Susan cried because I’d forgotten the Cheez Whiz.

  She accused me of not wanting the baby.

  “What do you mean? Of course I want the baby,” I said.

  “You always leave the house after dark. Where do you go?”

  “Just walking. The Dorfmans’ve bought a brand-new Mazda. It’s a little cramped underneath, but the engine traps heat.”

  “You’re unhappy living here with me.”

  “Sweetie –”

  “It’s horrible, admit it. My awful urpiness in the mornings –”

  “I’m with you. You know that.”

  “Even my fingers are fat,” she said.

  I kissed her forehead. She touched my arms. Meckie had scratched the hell out of my wrists; the marks appeared as though I’d taken a razor blade to myself over the bathroom sink.

  ______

  Ultrasound: the first snapshots of our daughter. Dr. Potts, Susan’s obstetrician, a big man with skinny lips, spread the images on his office desk for us early one morning. All I could see in the pictures were two blurry bars, like a pair of unsharpened pencils, and what appeared to be a series of holes surrounded by rippling waves. The computer-enhanced compositions reminded me of bleak Scandinavian paintings I’d seen in art classes in college – impressionistic studies of people screaming on rocky, violent seashores.

  I pointed to one of the pencils. “Is that a penis?” I asked Potts. “We’re going to have a boy?”

  “That’s the head,” he said. His ears were padded with tufts of hair as pale as his papery skin. “I can’t be certain, but my guess is you’re looking at a lovely little girl.”

  Susan beamed and squeezed my fingers.

  In the Honda on the way home I carried the ultrasound prints in my shirt pocket, along with a grocery list: Cheez Whiz, cat food, Ajax, scallions .

  Susan wouldn’t let go of my hand. Today she was happy about the baby. Jessie hadn’t been penciled in on our calendar, but when we first got the news we decided to forge ahead. We’d always talked about raising a child someday. We reasoned that, eventually, most good citizens marshalled their genes and produced worthy heirs – it was one of the things that made them good citizens.

  Susan raised my hand to her lips and kissed my bitten nails. “We’ll teach her to wipe herself gently so she doesn’t get a rash,” she said, “and to go easy on the coconut when she’s baking a cake because coconut’s expensive now at the market, and we’ll show her how Peter Jennings’s face is more trustworthy than Dan Rather’s, though they’ll both be wrinkly by the time she’s watching the news, and we’ll impress on her –”

  The edges of the prints nudged my skin through the thin cotton fabric of my shirt. I shivered.

  A bulky cop stopped us at a crosswalk a block from our house. Healthy-looking children with all their limbs in place ran across the street, clanking their Back to the Future lunch pails against perfectly formed little thighs.

  Behind us a woman in a rumbling Pontiac lined her mouth with lipstick. She appraised herself rather critically, I thought, in her rearview mirror. I fantasized walking back to her car, opening the passenger door, and sliding in beside her.

  “And we’ll teach her to curtsy and to pray, and to have –” Susan caught her breath and gripped my hand till it hurt. “– unassailable character. Right, Josh?”

  ______

  The decision to have a child comes from a deep and private place in the heart, the part that holds marriage sacred, that honors long-range planning and decent behavior. And despite these family pillars, you’re never really sure if what you wanted was actually a baby.

  I tried to be happy. I tried to prepare. And all the while I was thinking, “Holy God, we’re going to be swimming in shit.”

  Susan taught me a prayer to pass on to the child:

  “Angel of God – come on, Josh, do it with me.”

  “My guardian dear,” I recited.

  “To whom God’s love.”

  “Entrusts me here.”

  “Ever this day … Joshua, ever this day…”

  “I forget.”

  “Be …”

  “At my side.”

  “To light, to guard.” />
  “To rule and guide.”

  Lately she prayed I’d do something with Meckie before the baby moved in. “The Knife,” as we called the cat (two of our quilts were in tatters), had grown into a good, solid hunter. Each day after school I’d come home to find pulled-apart little creature-hearts on our porch.

  “I won’t have our daughter crawling through diseased former things on the floor,” Susan told me one night.

  I was chopping daikon for a Chinese dinner. Chinese had been Susie’s favorite before she’d started craving okra. “Let me work with her,” I said.

  “You can’t work with cats. They’re untrainable. You, of all people, should know that.” She looked at me.

  “What is it?” I said.

  “I was wondering what kind of daddy you’ll make.”

  “Shall we trot out all my flaws? They’re in a bag here somewhere – no no, those are the mushrooms …”

  She laughed. “Our little girl’ll be screaming for supper and you’ll be out with your head up a Rabbit’s ass.”

  I liked to hear her laugh. “Help me clobber these carrots, will you?” I handed her a knife. “I’m ready for her, Susie. I’m ready for anything.”

  “How do you know?”

  “My dreams,” I said.

  Usually my past returned m sleep. Like videotapes, my dreams replayed hard facts and added very little by way of imagination or editorial comment. Often at night my mind recalled the trips I’d taken on research grants: Barcelona, where I once found a rare wire-haired Balinese under an I.R.A.-brand delivery truck, Iran in the Shah’s last year of power. Behind an outdoor market in Tehran I’d followed a beautiful blotched tabby down a dead-end alley. The cat had whorls instead of stripes, an uncommon marking in the Middle East, and I wanted to note its gender, the state of its health, etc. Two SAVAK agents picked me up and took me in for questioning – strange behavior, they said. Suspicious character.

  But last night my dreams had been different. “Forward-looking,” I told Susan. “In one dream I followed a slender Siamese under a classic white Fairlane. When I poked my head beneath the bumper, the oil pan started to leak and out popped a baby drenched in ro-W-40. ‘Papa,’ she said. ‘Take me home and show me the good life, with Mars bars and lots of TV.’”