The Woman Who Married Her Own Son and Other Stories: Full Text

The Woman Who Married
Her Own Son

and
Other Stories

Contents

Title PAGE

El Sexo 1.

Angels 29.

After Marx 44.

The Other Mother 68.

Slip of the Tongue 93

Fish in the Water 129.

The Woman Who Married Her Own Son 155

Disgrace 181

El Sexo

Magdalena could see from the car window all the way into the long hallway beyond the front door of la casa, lit yellow the way she hated light to be. Lit yellow windows in the night made her shudder but not this time because there was something bright red, drawing her attention, just as frightening as whatever secret things went on in yellow lit nightrooms. She couldn't believe her eyes. The red object was her cousin Dulce's thighs and calves, muslos y pantorrillas, encased in the red tights Magdalena's Papi had brought from Miami. Mujer Mala. Was Dulce a Mujer Mala? This must be how a Mujer Mala dressed. She was perched on the porch railing in her red tights, really almost naked, talking to Robertico who lived two doors down and was already almost a man.

Magdalena clenched her hands. Her palms, just where they met her wrists, were sore from practising cartwheels most of the afternoon on the pebbly street outside her house. She kept on practising long after Mami began calling her in for her bath. She'd thrown her body over and over full weight onto her hands, kicking her legs up, until at last she'd discovered the secret: stretching her waist. She stretched her waist now, turning a cartwheel in her mind, as she approached and reached the porch close up to her cousin Dulce in the bright red tights.

See through tights right on the front porch was even worse than the lastex toreador pants, the ones with black curlicued appliques along the sides of the legs. Magdalena prayed Dulce would one day hand them down. If only one of these years Magdalena would open the box of handed down old school uniforms and threadbare gingham dresses from Dulce and find the white lastex pants folded right on top!

Dulce had just seen Magdalena and her Papi and her Mami getting out of the car and she was waving both hands, leaning forward as if she might fall from her perch on the molded concrete porch railing, the red tights meant for skinny Magdalena stretched almost see through on Dulce's round hips, thighs, legs. The pink flesh glowed under the red nylon, bursting like an overripe mamey. "Practically naked". Papi shook his head. She studied Papi's grimace. Was he thinking Dulce's a Mujer Mala? Was this El Sexo? The sin he said in his sermons was the worst of all. He looked grim as they crossed the narrow street and entered the pool of yellow light from the streetlamp right in front of the house, shining on Dulce's mamey red flesh like a spotlight on the tv rumba dancers, the vedettes on the Cabaret Carnaval.

Dulce teetered forward as they got closer to her perch. She just missed her enamorado Robertico and threw herself right into Papi's arms as he crossed in front of her. The grimness left his face. He hugged her and laughed almost as much as Dulce laughed. She straddled his hips with her Mujer Mala red legs. El sexo? Magdalena walked between them and the porch rail, her head no higher than Dulce's perch. "Puta". Magdalena's mind formed the word. Papi must be thinking that word. All the neighbors must call her puta behind her back. Even that fool blonde Robertico must be calling her puta as he looked at his watch and waved goodbye. But nobody called Dulce puta to her face.

Tia Mila and Abuela got up from where they sat in the wide hallway on their cane seat rockers catching the breeze and listening to the Novela de las Siete. First Abuela and then Tia rushed into Papi's open arms. Abuela headed for the kitchen. Before Mila could finish saying, "Voy a colar cafe," Dulce grabbed Magdalena's hand and pulled her into her bedroom. She came at Dulce with a bright red lipstick from the dozens scattered on top of her dresser among small jars of makeup and perfume, costume jewelry, hairbrushes and combs. Dulce stood Magdalena by the dresser. "I'm going to make you up."

The dresser was covered by a thick film of face powder. Magdalena licked her finger and wrote her name in the dust. Dulce tilted Magdalena's face back like a giant doll, dipped a tiny brush into the lipstick, and carefully painted bright red lips. The younger girl squirmed. She had the funny feeling that made her want to squeeze her thighs tight, like when she had to pee but somebody else was in the bathroom.

After she was done with her lips Dulce tied a cotton nightgown to Magdalena's waist like the train of a vedette's costume on Cabaret Carnaval, and tied a gossamer negligee from Miami to her own waist. She turned on her radio. "I'll teach you how to dance." She jumped onto the bed and hefted Magdalena up by the armpits. "No one can teach her." Dulce said this to the dresser mirror facing them a few feet away from the foot of the bed. The round mirror stood for the audience of their cabaret. Dulce was a good dancer. She was allowed to dance and Magdalena was not. Dancing had to do with being a Mujer Mala and with "El Sexo", that most terrible of sins her Papi bellowed about in so many of his sermons. But at Dulce's house Papi didn't mind the dancing.

He sipped his cafecito with Abuela, Tia Mila and Mami in the hallway telling stories about the Rebels, saying if Cuba had a revolution so would Ventura, acting like there were no Mujeres Malas anywhere, especially not right down the hall. She thought of Papi and the bellowed "El Sexo", pictured herself cartwheeling, and bounced faster and higher on the bed, faster than the wave of puke wanting to shake out of her. Dulce jumped higher. She shook her butt faster, turned her back to the mirror and gave their audience her rump.

Magdalena was laughing so hard she didn't notice when she jumped clear off the bed and landed on the floor on top of Dulce's slippers, still laughing so hard tears popped out of her closed eyes. She looked up and hairy legs were straddling her, Dulce's brother Chama's legs. Above her eyes was a crooked guiro gourd, his pinga. The hairy sack of his huevos dangled underneath. She'd seen all this before, every time he barged in on them naked except for his bathrobe whenever he heard them dancing. He'd gotten hairier. "Vete, vete, vete." Dulce started the 'get out' chant. Magdalena slid from underneath him and rolled under the bed. She stared up at the bouncing bed frame until the door closed behind Chama.

She was still under the bed when Papi came to the door. She saw his legs in the tan trousers and his polished brown shoes with little holes. He was wearing his preaching clothes. He was going off to the Interior to preach for a week and was leaving her and Mami at his sister's. She lay perfectly still waiting for a secret to be revealed. He was hugging Dulce. "Y Miga?" One of his nicknames for her was Miga. It sounded a little like Magdalena but it meant a little crumb of bread. She rolled out, bounced up, clutched his legs."Don't go away." How she didn't want him to leave. But Papi was always leaving.

Spent from their dancing Dulce and Miga lay on their backs on the bed staring at the ceiling fan. Breathless. Dulce turned onto her side and put her hand on her young cousin's belly. "Does Paquito come over to your house?" Magdalena shook her head. She wasn't sorry her cousin Paquito never came to visit. He was loud and pushy and the one time he did visit he wanted the crusts of his toast cut off and his toast cut into tiny triangles. "You live in the culo del mundo." Magdalena nodded. She didn't want Paquito to visit, but she wanted Dulce who'd never once come no matter how far back Magdalena thought. Why did Mami make them move too far for anyone to ever come?

"When Paquito comes he's going to tell you about the bidet." Magdalena turned on her side to face Dulce. "I know about the bidet." Dulce must mean using it when your family ran out of toilet paper. Her family almost never did, but at Dulce's sometimes there were neat little squares of newspaper where the toilet paper should be. One time Dulce's Father told them all, gathered in the hallway, that washing with the bidet and drying with a cloth was a far better way to clean the culo. Magdalena couldn't get over how it was alright at Dulce's house to curse. Culo, mierda, cono...these words she'd been slapped and shaken for accidentally blurting out were just plain words at Dulce's. Papi didn't appear to notice when Dulce or her brother Chama or her father Nelo said them.

Dulce squirmed closer. She whispered so close Magdalena felt her breath right on her earlobe prickling the hairs on the back of her neck. "Paquito told me to sit on the bidet and squirt the water hard on myself and think about him. It's like singar but without singar." Magdalena squeezed her eyes shut tight. She thanked God right then Tia Mila appeared at the door. "Are you hungry?." She flicked off the ceiling fan. Tia Mila and Abuela were the only ones Magdalena hadn't heard cursing.

While Dulce was giving the dancing class the other tias and primos had come home from work and gathered in the hallway to tell what they'd heard at work and on the bus about the rebels. As she stepped out of Dulce's bedroom Magdalena pictured all of her aunts and cousins stepping aside to admire her cartwheeling the full length of the long hallway, all the way to the dining room, where they were all now beginning to gather by the table around Tia Laura. "You don't believe me? I'll prove it to you." Tia Laura jumped up from her place at the kitchen end of the table. She was tall like Papi and had the same long face and big nose. Magdalena sat close to Dulce and leaned her elbows on the red flannel backed rubber cloth. She pictured herself cartwheeling under the table to hide from the rising din.

She wanted to hide but couldn't stop staring at Tia Laura who was coming up to each person around the table bellowing over and over, "I'll prove it to you." Laura worked her way around the table to the chair right beside Magdalena where Tia Claudia, the youngest Tia, was bouncing her infant daughter on her lap. Before Claudia could stop her Laura lifted baby Pituca, lay her on the table right by Magdalena , undid the diaper pins, pulled down the yellow drenched diaper, and pointed to the baby's vulva. The others stood from their chairs and gathered closer to stare at the baby who laughed and airswam her legs.

Tia Laura turned to Magdalena. "Now I'll show you. Get up Miga." Tia Laura hefted Magdalena onto the table, grabbed her knees, yanked open her legs and pulled down her panties. "You see. The papaya does not grow. The baby's papaya is the same size as the girl's." The part of Magdalena wanting to scream no, no, no dove deep inside into the blackness behind her closed eyes. Just before she closed her eyes she looked among the faces for Mami's. They'd never have done this if Papi hadn't gone. Why wasn't Mami making them stop? She couldn't find her. Just as she closed her eyes she caught the glint in Chama's eyes, staring at her center. No, no, no, no, no...

Later that night Magdalena broke her bottle. Mami had told her many times that when she broke the next bottle she would not get another. Enough was enough. She almost never drank out of her bottle around Dulce and Chama. But that night she didn't care if they made fun of her for as long as she lived. One moment Magdalena was sitting curled up in Tia Mila's big rocker in the hallway sucking the sweet milk, eyes closed, the wall light shining on her closed eyes, filling up with sweetness and yellow light. Next moment she felt the bottle slip from her hands, crash on the tiles, shatter. She screamed, she pulled at her hair, she made fists with her hands and hit her head.

"Diantre muchacha, diantre, diablo, diantre. Break everything. Sigue asi. Don't you hit yourself. Let me do the hitting." The flat of Mami's hand caught Magda on the side of the face. Her hands yanked her off the rocker, shook her shoulders. Magdalena shuddered when Mami's nails dug into the thin flesh over her shoulder blades. "I'll hit you ten times harder if you cry." Magda felt her neck snap each time Mami shook her shoulders hard.

At last Mami was gone. Magdalena curled up face to the wall on the bed alongside Dulce's, Chama's old bed. He now slept in his own room, behind the kitchen, a room that would have been a maid's room in a house that didn't have so many Tias. Thank God Dulce had not yet come to bed. She was on the porch again, perched on the railing wearing the red tights like they were pants, entertaining Robertico. Magdalena longed for her bottle and the sweet pleasure of sucking herself to sleep. She imagined herself cartwheeling on her own pebbly street. She threaded the long double bed pillow between her legs, Tia Mila's old marital pillow for two heads. She squeezed the pillow tight.

The door creaked open. "Miga." Dulce didn't whisper. She stomped her feet. Magdalena pretended to be asleep. Her shoulders still hurt from Mami's nails and her head after getting shook hard always felt like it wasn't screwed on right onto her neck. She didn't want to listen to Dulce's stories of Robertico's courtship. "Come mierda." Dulce didn't whisper. Magdalena breathed slow like sleepers breathe. She heard Dulce drop her shoes, peel off the tights, pull off the lacey white blouse, and slide into one of her see through nylon nightgowns from Miami. In a few minutes Dulce would begin to squirm and moan.

Magdalena shut her eyes softly the way sleeping people really shut their eyes, until Dulce got quiet, letting out tiny sleeping sighs. At last Abuela and Tia Mila finished their night rounds of the house, shutting off the radio in the front of the hallway, and the light just outside Dulce's door. Magdalena squeezed the pillow between her thighs and listened hard in the dark for the sounds coming from the bedrooms with doors opening at either side of Dulce's room. To the left of her narrow bed was the door, always ajar, to Tia Mila's and Tio Nelo's bedroom. She could hear Mila's slippers scraping on the tiles as she tossed them and raised her legs onto the bed. The metal bastidores under the cotton mattress squeaked. Magdalena shook when Tio Nelo let out a loud laugh. What were the secret words of their night whispers?

Alongside Dulce's big bed was the door, always ajar, to Abuela's room where she slept alone. Abuelo had moved into a room of his own across the hall. Seconds after she finished her nightly whispered prayer Abuela began her whistling snores. The whistling blended with the frog croaks, the cricket chirps and cat meows, the distant dog barks.

Beyond Abuela's was Tia Laura's enormous room with the huge double bed in the middle which she'd shared forever with her younger sister until Claudia got married last year and moved away. Laura now shared the giant bed with the big woman from the bodega. Magdalena pictured Laura examining the woman's papaya, boyo, chocha. She shuddered and wanted to throw up.

She was glad she couldn't possibly hear Abuelo's barking snores, nor Chama's screaming laughter. For their visit Abuelo had moved behind the kitchen, in with Chama. Across the hallway Mami slept in Abuelo's room, alone, waiting as always for Papi to get home from being an evangelist.

All of them breathed and moaned doing whatever it was people did in their dark moist caves at night. She hated their night sounds and erased them in her mind by killing them all and strewing their bodies on a field. She walked among the bodies in a see through nightgown like Dulce's, holding a candle. She'd seen just this image in one of Chama's horror comic books. She couldn't be good and have that thought, but once it sprung she couldn't think it back in.

Once she was sure Dulce was asleep Magdalena opened her eyes and gazed at the moonlit walls of the room, and through the bedroom door, beyond the pasillo and its rockers at the terrifying shadows falling from the ceiling beams and flying off the plants hanging from the eaves into the patio. Sleep wouldn't come after the murder field and she lay wondering when the shadows might swoop down like parachutes. Parachutes were creatures she'd seen in Chama's horror comic books that sucked blood, a kind of vampiros.

She wanted to pee and poo but she couldn't brave the vampire shadows. Sleep began to suck her in. A delicious melting began below her waist, in her center, in that secret place they'd made the whole world see. First she pretended it never happened at all, then she thought, it happened to Pituca too, then she thought it only happened to Pituca. Sleep was sucking her in deeper. She wanted to pee and poo and it wouldn't be so bad to do it right here. She felt a melting golden light in her secret place, a delicious easing. Slowly, sweetly, she wet and soiled herself. She'd be sorry in the morning but now, she surrendered to the delight of letting go.

She woke up early, even before Abuela, gave herself a scrubbing with cold water in the bathroom, changed into clean shorts and a blouse, and washed the soiled sheets in the pila outside. If they asked she'd shrug and they'd guess she wet the bed. After the sheets were hanging with the rest of Mila's laundry, Magdalena went to the flat end of the patio behind the pila, behind Nelo's workbench, to practice her cartwheels. She had a picture of the movement in her mind and she could make her body do it. She brought down her hands and kicked up her legs. The first two times she folded in at the waist, but the third time, she could feel her waist stretching her cartwheel nearly perfect.

That was when Mami found her and yanked her by the hair. "Diantre, cochina, devil pig." After beating Magdalena Mami dragged her to the dining table, made her drink cafe con leche, and shoved into her mouth buttered pan de manteca she'd dunked in the milk. The white scalded milk with three drops of coffee and floating rings of melted butter made her retch. She squirmed away, ran to the bathroom, bolted the door shut and threw up. She stood at the long bathroom window staring at the adjoining house to see if anyone was looking in.

She looked beyond the house at the purple mountains. She didn't believe any more the mountains were the heaven they spoke about in Sunday school. She'd been much less lonely when she believed the people in the Sunday school stories lived in those purple mountains and their stories had happened in the mountains just that week. She was less lonely when she believed her Papi went to the purple mountains when he went away to preach. Now she knew the mountains were where the Rebels were. She shuddered from the longing for her Papi, the one who loved her. She thought she saw eyes peering from the shutters of the next house and she slammed the bathroom shutters closed.

Chama pounded on the bathroom door. When she came out Magdalena saw he was getting ready to go to the patio with a handful of long, thin wooden rods in one hand, and a dozen strings in the other. "La Vomitona." He tickled her under the chin on the way into the bathroom. She shook him off but waited until he was done to see if this was one time he would let her watch him make things. He grabbed his stuff and strode outside. She caught up with him way at the rear of the patio at Nelo's workbench. He hummed as he made notches at each end of a long flexible wooden rod, and slid the knotted end of a string into each notch. He took the string out of the notches, made it shorter, tried again. Each time the rod curved tighter.

"You're making a bow." She stood closer. He kept on humming. The sun felt good on her back and head. She was absorbed completely in his industry. She leaned into him, breathing on his neck and ear. If she stayed very quiet would he let her make a bow? In her mind's eye she saw herself repeating his efforts and imagined how she might do it better, imagined how to tie the knots on the string, how to ease them into the slots so they would stay. She'd seen bows and arrows in cowboy movies and believed she could also make them as well as Chama. She put her arm around his shoulder. "No me jodas. You're a pest." She laughed. This must be a choteo. All her cousins liked to chotear about her milk bottle, her bed wetting, her big feet, her dark skin. Papi said it was just jokes, fun. Something was wrong with her because she didn't laugh. Choteo made her want to cry.

Chama elbowed her in the chest, brought his face up close. "Te voy a joder yo a ti." He tickled her hard under the armpits, under the neck. She laughed hard and wanted to run away. He pushed her off the chair onto the hot sunlit cement patio floor. Chama pushed down her panties. Before Magdalena could tear away he opened her legs like Tia Laura had done, took a good close look, and shoved his index finger into her center. It burned. It burned. Her closed eyes were facing up and the sunlight filled her head with light. She saw from far above, from higher than the teja roof, the girl, and the big boy who bent over her, his long fingers burning her insides, the girl burning and drowning in light.

Magdalena felt herself, a tiny figure, walking on a field of ochre sand, not the flat yellow sand of those other dreams in which the ocean roared nearby. This was oceanless desert sand. She walked and bottomless craters exploded in the ground. The ground cracked zigzag bottomless ravines. Magdalena walked. And Chama walked ahead of her. She followed him. In the far distance a tall ochre tower jutted from the ground. On the tower stood two tall monks in long brown robes. The monks brought bows to their chests. They aimed the bows. Magdalena knew what they would do and wished there was something she could do about it. She watched as the monks shot arrows. She watched the arrows fly. Each arrow took out one of Chama's eyes. She screamed. Her own screams woke her. The moonlit nighthouse silenced her screams. Dulce stirred. Tia Mila moaned next door. Abuela hissed her whistling snore. O please, please God. Don't let them wake up.

Early in the morning Tia Mila called Magdalena to her bed. She crawled in between Mila and Nelo, closed her eyes and let Tio Nelo crush her to his chest. "Miga, mira." Tia Mila put Tio Nelo's morning cigarette gently between her lips. She had called Magdalena in because Magdalena liked to see Tia Mila lighting Nelo's cigarettes. Tia Mila took one puff. "Daselo tu." She gave Magdalena the cigarette to hand to Nelo. He laughed. "Pruebalo." Magdalena took a tiny suck of the hot foul air. It tasted awful. But it didn't matter. When she grew up she would smoke even if that was what a Mujer Mala did. She would live in this house and there would be a floor made of ashtrays like a piece of a beehive she had once seen. She would be free to walk, smoke, toss out her cigarettes into the hive of ashtrays made into a floor just for her.

Magdalena sat on the cold tile floor by one of the big rockers in the pasillo at Tio Nelo's feet listening to him tell the Tias that the Rebels were never going to win. Her Papi believed they would and wanted them to. How she wished he were here to tell Nelo how wrong he was. Tio Nelo was making her rub his smelly feet. He rubbed her head. "Ahi. Ahi. Press harder right there." Magdalena pressed her thumb into Tio Nelo's right arch. She too had an instant of pride at being selected among the nieces to rub his feet. But now she wanted to puke. "Huelen a queso. Yo no los toco." Dulce never rubbed her father's feet. The foot Magdalena was kneading now was hot, moist. The black socks had left tiny worms of lint between the toes. They might come to life at any moment.

"Ahi. Miga. Ahi." Tio Nelo moaned and laughed the way he laughed at night in bed with Tia Mila. This was not alright with Magdalena. She tried to catch Mami's eye but Mami was pretending to listen to the novela on the radio. Mami was in the clouds. Everybody said that. Papi said that. "Esta en las nubes." If she was in the clouds then she came down as lightning. Magdalena wished she could be in the clouds too but she floated only as far as the vigas, nestled into one of the high hanging plants, and watched them all from above. Abuela, Tia Mila, Tia Laura, and even Dulce, out shouted each other talking back to the bad woman of the novela who had convinced her husband she was in a wheelchair but moved about the house doing evil things when no one was around. And to the husband. Mila waved her sewing."No la creas." Laura banged the arms of her rocking chair. "Que come mierda." Mami said nothing.Tio Nelo's eyes rolled up into his head. The little girl kneading his feet would never want to eat cheese again. Up on her plant perch Magdalena laughed.

Magdalena pushed as hard as she could against Dulce's shoulders. "Quitate. Sueltame. Quitate." Dulce dropped her full weight on Magdalena, pressed her chest against Magdalena's face. "I know you shit the bed. Cagona." Magdalena squirmed her legs, squirmed her shoulders side to side. Her scream was muffled. She couldn't breathe. She burned with rage. "Pero que hacen?" Dulce stopped the instant she heard Tia Mila, rolled off Magdalena, and gave her mother the angel smile. "She started." Tia Mila smoothed Dulce's long braids.

Magdalena jumped off the bed and took off running to the patio. She did cartwheels until an intention formed. She walked to the workbench. Chama was away. Rage shuddered through her and burned tears down her face. She took Chama's best bow and his best arrow and she walked out through the wooden gate of the patio to the empty lot behind the casa where he had his target nailed onto a tree. She found a spot barren of weeds and rubble and stood with her feet planted wide the way she'd seen Chama do. She placed the arrow into the string and pulled the string the way he did. The arrow tumbled off. She bent down fast and tried again, again, again. Her fingers were red raw when she at last got the arrow to glide into the air and hit the bottom of the mark.

She swept off rubble between the roots of the target tree and she sat down leaning into the fat trunk and gazing up at the sky through the branches. She resolved to sit perfectly still until somebody came looking. It was dark when she saw Chama approaching her through the monte. She didn't know if she was more scared of being alone or of having Chama for her rescuer. "Estas loca? Magdalena la loca." He took the bow and arrow from her hand, gave his dog howl laugh, and started pulling her by the hand through the monte back to the house.

Papi's voice woke her up. He was home. She listened to his whispered voice melding with Mami's in the room across the way. She felt a wave of warmth from her feet to her chest. Their voices were a kind of song together so Mami's shout came like a blow. "Who is she? Quien es la otra?" Mami got louder. Papi got silent. Magdalena wrapped the long pillow around her head leaving out just her nose and chin. Next morning she lay in the bed waiting. Waiting. Any minute Papi would appear at the door the way he always had since before she could remember. He'd watch her until his presence woke her.

And here was Papi now, walking in, approaching the bed, "Mi Miga. Mi Miguita de pan." He pulled her up gently and folded her in his arms. Inside she was filling with tears. But she mirrored his giant smile, drank in the light from his yellow brown eyes. She sank into his chest for just a moment. Mami stood in the doorway, smiling. The Good Mami emerged when Papi came home. There would be no more shrieks and beatings as long as Papi was here.

For the hallway rocking party Magdalena was princess on Papi's lap. He rocked her. He bounced her. He sat her on his legs sideways and told the story about, "I was walking on an old road..." opening his legs for her to fall between them whenever he came to, "and then I fell." Magdalena's head hung over his thigh. She looked up at the vigas and the plants swaying gently in the afternoon breeze. Everyone was laughing. Magdalena was the princess. Not even Dulce could get the others to look away when Papi was home and Magdalena was on Papi's knee.

In that night's dream Magdalena lay alongside Papi wearing Mami's red Sunday dress. Magdalena was the real wife. The little wife. Mami was gone. She'd taken Mami's place. She was big enough to be the woman, in the dream. Woman sized. And she was the real wife. La Otra.The one Papi truly loved. When Mami appeared at the door of the dream room, dressed in the very same dress Magdalena wore, Magdalena rose and slunk away.

She woke up, brimming with badness, bad through and through. She'd stolen Mami's husband. She remembered Mami's screams: Who is she? Quien es la otra? Magdalena. Magdalena was la otra, la Mujer Mala. La otra. She felt the badness rise up her throat, turn her inside out. She ran as fast as she could barefoot on the cold tiles and made it to the bathroom just in time. The vomit was the bitter kind, so bitter it burned the back of her throat and her tongue and made her gag and throw up more of the badness. It was her badness coming up. She fell beside the toilet sobbing until she heard Chama pounding on the door. "Sal ya Vomitona. Get out."

"Vamos a darle la vuelta a la manzana." For their journey around the block Dulce took Magdalena by the hand and laughed when Magdalena shook free and raced ahead to the left past the big nave where Abuela kept her milk goat, past the fat, fat tree, over the tree's roots which had cracked the sidewalk, and its dry brown berries, crushing the brown berries into the brown stained cracked cement. "Mira." Dulce stopped her to point into the dark interior of a house with its door ajar. In the front room a woman in a house dress leaned over a mop. The porch rockers were still leaning against the urn shaped concrete pillars of its railing, waiting for the pine oil mop water to dry. "Es puta. They're all putas in that house. Men are coming in and out at all hours of the day and night. And they make dirty sexo movies of people singando to sell in El Norte."

They ran because the woman came onto the porch singing as she set the rockers right. The next house was set in further from the street and the doors and windows were nailed shut. "Exilados. They left everything. There's a watchman who comes by every night to make sure nothing's been taken. All the furniture is covered with sheets. It's turning into a ghost house." Dulce ooooood and Magdalena raced Dulce to the corner. Dulce followed good and slow. Magdalena let terror squirm her where she stood under the yellow glow of the corner street light, waiting to make the thrilling turn onto the other block. From here she could see the quincalla's narrow entrance with the small toys, earrings, coloring books, notebooks, and colored pencils hanging from the open door.

The best part of the journey was walking past the Chocolatina factory. Dulce smiled and begged and a workman who'd been outside the door smoking a cigarette gave her a bag full of broken cookie bits. They sucked on the chocolate covered crumbs all the way back home.

Magdalena stood smiling on the church steps beside Mami in her Sunday black dress. The twentyonlydress is what Dulce called that dress. It was the one Mami wore almost every Sunday. Magdalena wore one of Dulce's old party dresses, yellow, see through, with a sewn in yellow satin slip and a big bow tied behind at the waist. Tia Mila had braided Magdalena's hair like she braided Dulce's and had woven yellow ribbons into the braids. She'd splashed lots of agua de violeta on her hair and on her neck and inside her elbows. Dulce was not the only special girl today.

Because Papi was preaching at Abuela's church everyone had come come, even Chama and Tio Nelo, and the others, with Abuela, had already gone inside to sit in the front pews. Lots of people came to hear Papi preach. Already he'd put on his big black robe, and he was shaking hands with the people filing in, all of them smiling at Mami and Magdalena. "Que familia tan linda." She'd heard it too many times today. When they bent down to kiss her she prayed the agua de violeta had covered up the smell of puke. But no amount of bathing and agua de violeta could wash away that smell.

She got the spot by the aisle on the third row, left side of the church. There was nothing much to look at. The ceiling fans were turning, the shuttered windows were open, and still it was hot enough to fall sleep. As the choir filed in Magdalena imagined they were flinging off their robes to reveal Cabaret Carnaval vedette glitter suits, exposed legs and arms, feet doing dance steps, butts swivelling. Their song the program called introito became a rumba. She watched them dance all the way to their perch behind the pulpit. She stared up at the ceiling fan, watching for possible parachutes, or signs that they'd been there at night, until Papi began his sermon. His preaching could be a song, if she didn't pay attention to the words and mostly she didn't. He started with a low hum, like when he stood by her crib and sang her lullabyes, and slowly the sound grew to thunder. The choir was still dressed in their cabaret vedette clothes when he first bellowed "el sexo", the most terrible of the sins.

Magdalena sat on the porch swing letting it glide front and back and watched Dulce wobble to the corner in a tight navy blue straight skirt and high heels (Already! And, also she wore a bra). She dangled from her hand the little baby blue sweater Papi had brought her from Miami. "Adios, Miga." Dulce, Tia Mila, Tia Laura and the tall woman from the bodega turned the corner and disappeared. Going to the movies! Magdalena wasn't allowed to go to the movies on Sunday. She didn't know what was worse, the pain of being left behind, or the pain in her right eye that she would get from all the cigarette smoke in the cine. She felt a buzzing inside her ears from being so mad.

Magdalena walked out to the patio and practiced her cartwheels over and over. She imagined the world when she grew up. Everybody would go to the movies on Sunday. They'd wear cut out clothes Magdalena had invented, with holes so that the women's breasts could be seen, nipples and all. The dresses would be like vedette costumes or bathing suits, but not for the water. The future women wobbled on high heels, their soft breasts bouncing, their legs naked, into the movie theatre lobby where they stood around in their cutout clothes making conversation as if those clothes were normal. And they were. After all, in the future that was the normal way to dress para diario, just the way the vedettes got to dress on stage.

"A la cama." Mami, already in her nightgown, called out from the back door. Tomorrow they'd be getting up early to go back to their own little house in the Reparto Playa Nueva, the culo del mundo according to Dulce. She could practice cartwheeling as much as she needed to again. Magdalena ran past her, down the long hallway to the bano at the very end. She knew Mami would have given anything to go to the cine too. When she grew up she wouldn't let her husband stop her from wearing the cut out dresses and wobbling on high heels to the movies or anyplace at all.

But next morning nobody was drinking their cafe con leche. They were gathered in the hallway like in the afternoon. "They found him by the river bank." Tia Laura rocked fast. "Robertico, el hijo de Catalina?" Tia Mila paced by the wide doorway to the side patio. She was sobbing. Magdalena stood by the doorway staring hard. She'd never seen Tia Mila cry. Dulce was screaming. "Robertico, Robertico, Robertico. He was on the porch with me last night." Right then the tall woman from the bodega arrived. She sat on the arm of Laura's rocker. She knew everything. "He had no nails. They pulled them off. They dragged him out of the house in the middle of the night. They took out his eyes. They threw him into the river naked. He had a load of armas largas in the trunk of his car. He was going to drive them to the mountains. That's what the soldier said who came in for a palo de ron an hour ago."

"Cabrones." Abuela made her hands into tight fists. She was one person Magdalena had never heard curse until now. "Cabrones sin madres." Tia Mila threw herself into Abuela's arms. Magdalena couldn't believe how the two women were shaking. Dulce squeezed herself between them. She was wailing. "Robertico. Robertico. Robertico."

"You put your hands down flat." Magdalena knelt by Dulce and spread her fingers flat on the little patch of concrete toward the far end of the patio. "When you kick up your legs you stretch your middle like you're stretching a rubber band." Dulce tried and although it was much better, she looked more like leapfrog than cartwheel.

"Show me how."

There was one thing Magdalena knew how to do that Dulce didn't do much, much better. Cartwheels, and vueltas de carnero. Last night after the cine Papi had asked her to show the Tias in the pasillo and Magdalena had been allowed to move the sillones to the side. She'd set up the rocking chairs like her very own audience. She'd done cartwheels coming and going. The Tias applauded when she was done. Even Dulce was clapping. Tia Laura had hefted Magdalena and given her a big kiss on the cheek. "You can work in the Circo."

And now, this morning, after the trip back to Playa Nueva was postponed because Papi had gone to pray with Robertico's mother, Dulce had asked Magdalena to show her how to do cartwheels.

Magdalena took Dulce to the back end of the yard, past the workbench. She demonstrated and she instructed. "You set your hands flat. You kick your legs up. You stretch your waist like a rubber band." Dulce tried it. She was more like a leapfrog than a wheel. Dulce tried again and again. Magdalena teaching Dulce! The cowering Vomitona was stretching her waist out, and she wasn't shaking. Magdalena teaching Dulce, imagine that.

Angels

Before the family woke up Luisa surveyed her handiwork and it was good. The old wooden table with the embroidered cloth under the clear vinyl held the chipped matched dishes with the border of little pink roses that Pablo's Mother had given to her before they got married. In the center of the table a blue plastic platter held the stack of pancakes she had just made for the children. The blue cups with cafe con leche were each at their place; Pablo's mostly coffee with a little milk; the children's mostly milk with drops of coffee for a bit of color. The scrubbed cast aluminum caldero was draining by the sink. The blue enamel coffee pot and the steel milk pot sat waiting on the stove for Pablo's second cup if he had time.

She walked to the sink and ran water into the tall juice can she had squeezed to make a pouring spout. She carried it with both hands to the window. She poured water into the three plants she had grown from seed: an avocado with its big eye-shaped leaves, a grapefruit with tiny tear-shaped leaves; and her pride, a tall mango with deep green shiny blade-shaped leaves, and always, new purple shoots. She had grown it from a mango Pablo had smuggled in from the Island, past the agriculture inspectors, so ripe the pit had already shot a root. Everyone who saw it marveled that she had gotten it to grow in the City.

She stood by the window and looked down at the quiet street, nobody about except one man bundled up to his ears hurrying to the train station. One day she would go down herself and sweep up the bits of newspaper, the paper cups, the dirty diapers in the gutter, to have the pleasure of seeing the street in order in the morning, like she was having now the pleasure of seeing her house in order in the morning. She breathed in the smell of wet earth. With her eyes closed, she could almost capture the early morning moment on the Island. She shook off this longing for that other life, that deeper, richer dirt. She opened her eyes and stepped back from the window. Last week she had washed the sheer frilled pale yellow curtains. She beheld them and the light coming through them. It was good.

Luisa walked to the children's room, stood by their door, gazed at them. She held this moment just before she woke the children. She stood at the door watching the din light coming in through the roll-up blinds on the windows. "Wake up angels." She rubbed the backs of the children at the shoulder blades where she told them each and every day that she was feeling for feathers, because in the night they were angels, angels in their sleep, flying around the Barrio, doing miracles."Wake up angel." Luisi opened his eyes. She saw him startle, remember where he was, where he was not. "What miracle did you do last night?"

A shadow darkened his gaze. She regretted making him remember he had not done the one miracle that needed doing. She should not make the angel joke again. She discovered with shame the joke was cruel. Why make Luisi feel in his imagination he could fix his Mother when in real life he could not?

Luisi's eyes went straight to the photo of his mother on the small table, now painted white, Luisa had salvaged from a neighbor's trash. In the photo Graciela's face was scrunched up against the sun. She wore white. The photo of Graciela holding Luisi's hand, he was also dressed in white, was washed by light. They were on the roof. You could see one side of Pablo's pigeon coop, see the diamond shaped wire mesh and half of one of the perched pigeons. Then you could see her son Pablito's hand holding Graciela's. Only his hand. The rest of Pablito didn't get into the picture. Luisa remembered Pablito's school friend Iris taking that picture the day Luisi turned three. June 19. How different things would have been if he'd married Iris and not Graciela! They had all gone to the roof to take pictures before the cake and ice cream while Pablito's white clothes were still clean.

Graciela looked happy, sunlit, clean. With her face scrunched up and with her husband and her baby holding each of her hands, the restlessness was not visible. Pablo had opened the coop and the pigeons had flown out and up and swooped across the flat blue summer sky. Even then, trying as she had not to see that terrible restlessness, Luisa had already known. The street was a dark wing, virulent.

Nobody had told Luisa when Pablito told her he'd gotten a 15 year old pregnant, who the 15 year old was, where the girl came from. He was 15 himself. When he brought the pale blonde thing into the house, they'd stood together by the door. Children themselves. Just children. And then Graciela walked over to the kitchen window to look at Luisa's avocado tree. Light hit the blonde, feather curls. That was when Luisa first made up her secret joke about angels. That Graciela was a fallen angel; that the baby she was bearing was an angel; even the conception was an angel's doing and not the result of her son doing what Pablo had told him not to do, what she had never mentioned but intended with every fiber of her being he never do. Even with her face scrunched up Graciela looked like Luisa. Everyone said she looked more like Luisa than Luisa's own son.

She shook Luisi gently."How about pancakes today?" Because she woke up at five anyway she made the children big breakfasts. She filled them up with everything she could at home, food, kisses, hugs. She covered them with protections: starched plaid Catholic school uniforms, gold chains with crosses, black azabache fists pinned to their undershirts.

Now Luisi sat on the edge of the bed and began to pull on his starched tan pants and stiff white shirt. Luisa turned to Gracie. She sat her up, still half asleep, against the pillows. She unbuttoned the little girl's flannel pajamas with the sheep pattern on it. She pulled the plaid uniform dress over her head. She took the washcloth from her housecoat pocket and gently touched it to Gracie's eyes. Sometimes Luisa hated taking Gracie from her dreams. She laughed out loud. She almost did believe the children were angels in their sleep.

She walked the half sleeping children to the kitchen table. Pablo had already almost finished his pancakes and was draining the last of his cafe con leche. She poured him his second cup, sat between him and the children, fed them spoonfuls of syrup soaked pancakes. Pablo stood, bent down to kiss her goodbye on the cheek, and squeezed her arm.

Luisa stood by the window and saw the three figures leave the building: Pablo with his brown brimmed hat and the collar of his long brown coat turned up. The children in their fluffy quilted jackets, his blue, hers bright pink. Graciela had brought the pink coat for Gracie the last time she'd turned up three weeks ago, brought it with a look of shamed surprise on her face as if she had just stumbled onto one of the things a mother does. Maybe she had once as a little girl gotten around to do what every little girl does which is dress up girl dolls. She watched until they turned the corner and then stood staring at the street. From looking at Graciela that first day, looking like Luisa herself, there was no way she could have dreamed what kind of little girl Graciela had been, already a second generation on the street. She shuddered at her imagination of Graciela's childhood, the child of a junkie mother; fatherless; watching her mother turn tricks. Maybe Pablito was her own first trick.

She heated milk, poured it into a cup, poured coffee into the very center of the milk, spooned sugar into it, and stirred. She sat at the kitchen table facing the window and she sipped her coffee. She clenched her jaw against the rising tide of grief. One tear rolled down her cheek. She savored the sweet, earthy taste of the cafe con leche. Coffee taste was the way earth would taste, wet earth would taste, if it could. She smiled. It was her deepest duty as a mother to remember life was good; she had trained herself to make this island of life of her own home good; polish it clean and good; frill its curtains light and good; remember it was good and make it good. And now, she did. She put herself in mind of how the other day she had said to Luisi, if you chase your sister in the house again and make me scream I will send you out to the mother who gave you birth and he had turned to her with those caramel eyes twinkling,and almost giggled when he said, you are the mother who gave me birth. She smiled. Luisi's smile washed clean even Graciela's darkwinged shadow.

Luisa stood a few feet away from the other mothers outside the school steps. They were almost girls and she half-listened to their talk about hair dyes and clothes. If only Pablito had gotten together with one of them. That one with the braided curls. Or with Iris who was almost done with college now. But he hadn't. She moved further into the shade of the gingko tree.

The school door opened and despite the Sisters' efforts at order, the line of children poured down the stairs, spilling and splashing kids. Luisa smiled as she saw her two approaching. Luisi held Gracie's hand until he saw Luisa and then let it go, to run to her.
"Ice cream?"
"Were you good?"
He nodded. Gracie stood behind him. "By the river?"
Luisa walked down to the river park with them, to the playground.
"Chocolate," Luisi said to Don Silvio.
"Chocolate," Don Silvio repeated, flattening the la and te into Spanish.
"Chocolate," Gracie said, the Spanish way.
Luisa sat on a bench to watch the children flying on the swings. Behind them, beyond them, she watched the flowing river, one lone sailboat pushed by the wind flitted by. The wind, invisible, embraced her, and on it her two angel children flew their swings.

They got home. She fed them. She set Pablo's dinner in tinfoil to keep warm inside the oven. She bathed the children. She settled them in their flannel pajamas in the living room to do their homework on the coffee table, no tv until they did. She settled herself near them in Pablo's recliner to watch La Perdida Santa with the volume low. She watched in the safety of knowing that La Perdida would be saved by the last episode. What would happen to her own perdida? She glanced over to the children. Were they mindful of the silly fairy tale of the telenovela? But Luisi, his face close to the marble notebook, erased with even strokes, so hard the page would surely tear; and Gracie copied over a long list of spelling words, each word five times.

She dozed until she heard Pablo's key in the door.
"Que susto, Pablo. I caught a fright."
She sat with him and watched him say a prayer over his plate of rice, beans, and chicken in salsa.
"I just dreamed of Graciela."
"Woman, por Dios, you and your dreams."

Later, after the children were sleeping, in the blue moonlit darkness of their bedroom, Pablo looked at Luisa in her white nightgown already almost asleep, saw her graying yellow brown hair loose around her smooth round face and remembered the young Luisa. In the dark, it was still possible to see the lush young beauty, the ripe woman's beauty. Sometimes, in this light, he still saw the most beautiful woman he had ever seen, an angel.

He slid under the covers beside her, and molded his body to her. His face against the back of her head, smelling her manzanilla scented hair, his chest againt her back, his groin against her ass able even in his exhaustion and his age to feel a stirring. Now, this was enough, this stirring had a fullness, it was complete. "Now, we make love like the angels." Luisa shook. Was she laughing or sobbing?

"What did you dream about Graciela?" He had been afraid to ask. He was afraid of Luisa's dreams. "Nothing." He was glad she wanted to keep the secret. Sleep was overtaking him and there was only so much he could bear to know at night.

Next morning after everyone was gone, Luisa knew there would be a knock on the door. She knew when she opened the door she would find Graciela on the other side. She sipped her coffee and waited. The knock came. She opened. She did not recognize Graciela at first. She let her in and sat her down. Without asking she poured her cafe con leche and brought out a loaf of bread. Graciela was so skinny Luisa wanted to feed her. She wanted to get her out of the house. But she also wanted to feed her. She set the cafe con leche by Graciela on the table and turned away from her. She looked in the refrigerator for last night's leftover rice and beans to heat up. She put the pots on the stove. She remembered her dream with Graciela in a plain pine box. She shuddered.

She let her gaze rest on the child. She was bone thin. Her eyes had the zombie cast she had seen before in nobody who had come to a good end and they were the hardest to take. She had her hair bleached light, and permed. It stuck out brittle and wirey around her wizened face, all eyes and red-painted lips. Luisa struggled to keep her eyes away from the tight black tube top, pushing tight against boy flat nipples, from the short, tight red skirt showing hip bones and yellowing skin. God forgive me, but who would want to pay to be with her now?
"I want my kids back."
Luisa sat down beside Graciela and put her hand on her skinny hand. "I know you want your kids back."
"I'm ready for my kids. I've got a new old man."
Luisa slapped Graciela's face.
"You want your kids. They are beautiful kids. They want their mother. But you can not have them."
"Let me see them. "
Luisa took a deep breath. How could she have hit this child? But to come rub some pimp in her own mother-in-law's face! And Graciela didn't even notice the blow. Was she that numb from the drugs, was she that used to being hit?
"They're in school. Don't you know what time it is?"
Luisa got up to spoon last night's rice and beans and on a plate. She set the plate down. "Now eat. Even if you aren't hungry. You're turning into a sack of bones."
Graciela looked at the food and picked up the fork and brought one small mound of rice to her lips. A shadow lifted from Graciela's gaze. Luisa thought she saw one instant of clear sobriety before the addict's body shifted to wanting the next fix. One instant when Graciela clearly saw the food in front of her, the good mother beside her, this other life she gave up for the street. How quickly she had gone from coming home late, to coming home late drunk, to coming home late high, to not coming home at all. Just for that one moment Luisa saw Graciela see everything she'd lost. Then the shadow returned to those zombie eyes of hers.

Luisa waited until Graciela had eaten as much as she would eat: a few mouthfuls of plain rice, a taste of beans.

"You have to go now. The police was here looking for you last week. I told them I hadn't seen you. I didn't know where you were. But if people see you here..."

Graciela rose. She rushed to the door.

Luisa picked up the dish and the cup and stood at the sink letting hot water run and run and run on them. She bent over with the weight of her tears, flowing, flowing, flowing from her eyes in two streams. She had lied to Graciela. There had been no police. She burned with the shame of it. She was keeping a mother from her own children. But there was nothing she wouldn't do to keep Luisi and Gracie from seeing her like this. She remembered watching on the Island a brown dog, a bitch, birthing puppies in the middle of the front room, dropping them, looking at them bewildered and walking on, only to drop another pup, look at it and keep going. In all she had dropped five pups and had not known to lick off their sacks or nudge them to the tits, not known even to lie down beside them, even to lie down at all, even to make a place where she and the pups could rest. All of the puppies died.

She closed the faucet, dried the dishes, put them back in the metal cupboard by the sink. She covered the pots and returned them to the refrigerator. She wiped the table. She wiped every trace of Graciela. When she saw the children she would not tell; when she saw Pablo she would not tell because mention of Graciela made him tremble with rage; Luisa must protect him, protect them all, protect those she could still protect. It would be as if Graciela truly had not been there, like not telling a dream.

She found her two children's faces among the gathered boys and girls in the two first front pews. All the girls in their Christ bride white dresses, all the boys in their navy blue suits. The church air was dusty, stippled. Sun-gilt light streamed shell-pink through the stained glass of the windows where Joseph fought eternally with his angel. Elsa squeezed Pablo's hand on her left and Pablito's on her right. The window was like one of those laboratory slides Pablito had to look through in High School the year he dropped out to marry Graciela, and that he had snuck out in his coat pocket just to show to her through the lightbulb in the living room lamp. "See, Ma? A slice of tree." She had dreamed that he might have grown to be an expert of trees, a knower of the names of all the trees, of the secret inner workings of the trees. Through the lightbulb you could only see sheer brown.
This Joseph fighting the angel church window was the same; a slice of the world held in glass to be studied. She was an expert on fighting angels. For today, the world was fine, fine. In the church the angel wars stayed safely behind glass. It was a place not for fighting angels but for looking at the fight; looking at the blessed mother's eternal smile; looking at the parading saints each with its task; but all of them fixed behind the glass; inside the statues; so that they could be contemplated. Luisa sighed.

She remembered that just when she thought Pablito's first communion was starting it was over. This time she paid attention. Pablito's childhood had been like that; just when she noticed he was learning to walk, he was running; just when she noticed he was learning to talk, he was talking. With Luisi and Gracie she paid attention. Luisi walked to the front, his gaze steady, his face serious, not grim, wise. Thank you God, that he is fine. Gracie walked forward smiling a pure, sweet, child smile, still a child. Thank you God, that she is fine. And then their moment was over and it was time for other children. Luisa watched. The sphere of her protection extended to her own beside her, to the children, to all the children. Thank you God, that they are fine. She closed her eyes with her own silent prayer and when she opened them it was time to file outside.

She burst with her husband and her son and her two grandchildren into the blazing May noon sun. She felt giddy, almost as if she were drunk. For an instant of sun blindness she stood outside the church door at the top of the stairs. Graciela was the first thing she saw. She was standing at the bottom of the church steps. She'd dressed in a Sunday green dress Luisa remembered, except that now it hung limp against her thinness. Had she been inside the church? She stood on very high heels seeming to move with the breeze, so light, so slight.

Luisi saw her too. Calling Mami he let go of Luisa's hand and ran down the steps. Gracie, calling Mami, followed. Walking down, slowly, slowly, Luisa saw Graciela pick up first Luisi and then Gracie and swing them in the air. Pablito gave them baths; Graciela spun them like a Daddy. Could this be right?

Luisa reached them. Pablito and Pablo walked away not looking at Graciela, or the flying children. They kept on walking and turned the corner. Graciela set Gracie down as Luisa reached her. Just for a second their gazes locked and suddenly Graciela gripped Luisa by the shoulders, squeezed her to her chest, lifted her in the air and spun her too, spun her, spun, her, spun her. In another moment it would be all gone, but just for now Luisa felt euphoria. The children clasped hands and spun in circles on their toes. Graciela spun Luisa. Luisa flew.

After Marx

"I felt the knife against my back. I didn't look at the man. I let him steer me into the alley, that narrow alley by the supermarket, next to the high rises by Mama's old building. I had anticipated this moment many times in my mind and now that it was here I just watched it happen. The man shoved his fist into my mouth. His entering burned."

Iris listened to the distant gunshots through the partly opened soot blackened window. Beyond it she saw the square buildings of the housing project. She stared at her motionless sister. Was that a flicker in the eyeball? She snapped the shutter of her camera. Ada did not move. Iris placed the gift wrapped orange chrysanthemums on her sister's lap.

"I could see the single yellow eyeball of the street lamp. He entered me standing, from behind. His entering burned. I felt him come at a huge distance." Iris whispered. "City police reports call You and I anonymous nonentities in harm's way, the victims of strangers."

Ada looked straight ahead. Iris looked at her watch. In another minute the nurse would come to bathe her sister. She took the flowers, unwrapped them, put water from the corner sink into the vase, and pushed the flowers hard into the water. She leaned forward and kissed Ada's smooth, cool cheek.

The man was saying his name was Jorge. Iris stood beside him in the center of the living room. She looked away from him at the huge red Party flag on the wall, the red drapes over the high bay window, the framed Party Congress posters with their images of fists and flames taken from her photographs. The other man remained on the low couch by the desk where Rodolfo must write his speeches and the incomprehensible theoretical articles for REDENCION. The man fingered the book he'd taken from the many tomes of theory lining the other walls. He pretended to read. The tall man who said his name was Jorge had the stiff, starched, tan look of an Island intellectual just arrived in the City.

"In France they have discovered a form of thinking that has outdated Marx," he said.

Iris let herself fall into the armchair. The man, with his Island arrogance, frightened her even before he spoke. But this petite bourgeois blasphemy! As if any thinking could transcend the thinking that had discovered the motor of history, the axles and pulleys on which moments and faces rode like ants. What other thinking had explained her to herself, named her pain Imperialism, named what was ailing her sister Ada oppression, and named their healing: Class War?

The man was a deluded, petite bourgeois fool. She saw the uniform of his class: the linen guayabera, the linen pants. She looked away from the mask face: the rictus of arrogance, the elevated, distant gaze, the perfect mustache. She fixed on the useless long fingered hands with their glossy, manicured nails, hands that had never wired a bomb.

He towered before her, then glanced behind himself at the other man. Iris saw him tell the man with his eyes to leave the room. She studied these secret, silent codes of male talk the way she had studied the language of street dogs on her one visit to the Island as a child. She watched the other man look at his empty wine glass and rise. Salsa blasted into the room when he pushed open the double doors. He pushed them shut behind him. She listened for the bass through the wall. She wished she were with the others, dancing.

The Island intellectual bent down and shoved his face against hers. She saw her alien prettiness reflecting, curved in his glasses. Whose was this pretty, funhouse face? She felt his hot, winey, wet tongue pushing against her lips. What did he think? That having stunned her with the unthinkable news from France he could now kiss her? All the Island guys thought City women militants were easy.

"Thanks but no thanks." She pushed him away. For one instant she saw a frightened boy peer from the intellectual's eye slits. Cold, brittle glass replaced the gaze of the vulnerable boy. He had flat yellow eyes. The child's eyes were hooded by the ice eyes of the brilliant man.

Ada sat by the window in the usual green plastic arm chair. She was no longer the baby sister. She was Iris' mirror, as tall now, with the same oval face and brown eyes. Iris gazed into them. She offered Ada a piece of the ripe Island mango she had brought her.

"You can eat this mango in the City but you can't find one on the Island any more. Fruit of colonialism." She placed the mango near Ada's nose, upon her lips. No salivation. No flicker of the retina. Ada's asymmetrical eyes remained dull and held blank emptiness where Iris had seen the eyes of others held a mirror or a depth.

Iris spoke to Ada of the block, the apartment, the revolution. She told her of the girl in Reader's Digest who woke up from a coma after seven years. She placed before her face and then on her lap prints of the photographs she'd taken last time showing the project buildings outside her window, the corner sink, and Ada on her chair, on the bed. She turned her sister's chair to face the sooty panes of the lone window. She longed to hold her sister. She pictured herself embracing her like a pieta painting. But when she placed her arms around Ada, she would not meld. Ada didn't stir. Still Iris came every Sunday and spoke to her silence. One year, one week, one day, one moment, her sister would speak again.

Iris walked, flanked by empty, burnt, gouged, crumbling, half-demolished apartment buildings and empty lot deserts filled with brick shards and trash. She looked behind and in front and snapped her shutter. She walked down the center of the barren street. She reached the only building it could be, the only one still standing, a gray, wood frame house. She read the weathered hand painted sign, the letters almost graffiti. Hijos de Zion. Up close the grayness was bare wood, weather stripped, rain stained. A young man, almost a boy, let her in.

"Gloria a Dios," he said. He was bone thin, short haired, scrubbed like the building. The hallway, the house, the boy, were weathered bones. "Everyone is out. Praising the Lord. Begging."

Iris nodded. That was how she had first run into los Hijos de Zion. She had been selling REDENCION and two of the Hijos approached her with their begging bowls. "I had told Brother Jose I wanted to do a story for REDENCION about your work and he told me to come by." The boy stared at Iris and stepped aside. As she entered she felt terror. It passed and she forgot it. "May I interview you?"

He shook his head. He led her by the hand into the adjoining room which would have been the living room. He sat her and left her on a scrap wood bench, the closest to the door, one of many, lined up in rows to make this room a chapel. At the front end of the room was a low platform with a cross shaped lectern and behind it, against the wall, hung a scrap wood cross. It was like a Party storefront scrubbed to the bone. Instead of Marx, Engels and Mauricio Clauvell peering form their picture frames there was a saint pierced by arrows all over, bleeding.

When the boy returned he led her to the stairs. "You can try to talk to this one." She followed him up the stripped wood stairs. Without asking she photographed up close sorry her black and white couldn't catch the faint tints of grays and greens from historic coats of paint. She passed rooms filled with rows of cots each one with a folded blanket.

She shuddered and told herself, 'They could kill me and stew me for their dinners for a month'. She saw through a clean-scrubbed window at the end of the top floor hall, a back yard with two trees with bare branches, and beyond them the gouged buildings and the rubble desert. If a woman is murdered and no one hears her scream, has the woman died? If a girl witnesses a murder and never speaks again does she unhappen it?

The boy pointed to a man who knelt beside one of the cots, against the windowless wall and beside a narrow doorway deep in the room. He pointed to her camera. "No photographs." The frayed, faded strip of Indian cotton hanging from the door frame swayed. The Holy Spirit entered. The man uttered syllables that were not words. The boy led her to the kneeling man who seemed not to notice their presence. God forgive me was his prayer.

"Perdoname Dios mio, perdoname Dios mio, perdoname Dios mio, perdoname Dios mio."

The boy looked at Iris and she read bewilderment in the raised eyebrows, the small smile. She mirrored his expression and the boy's smile widened. How to write an interview conducted in mime? The man prayed so long that Iris understood the prayer was his answer to her questions. At last he turned around, still on his knees, and raised his face. "The Lord wants me to speak with you." He rose and motioned for Iris to sit on the cot beside him. She begged the boy with eye mime not to leave the room but he left.

"I've killed you," the man said. "I've come up behind you with a knife and stabbed you. Or come at you from the front with a gun and shot you. I will never be done asking God to forgive me and God will never be done forgiving me. Reverendo Isaac says it doesn't matter how many people I've killed, in the eyes of God I am redeemed. But I can't stop asking very long for God to forgive me or the demon gets back into me. I can't leave the demon any room. I gave everything up to the demon. My wife. My children. I was hungry. There were not enough drugs on this earth to fill me."

His testimony vibrated with each repetition. The light was good enough to make out his face. The features were chiseled, the skin tight, scarred, the eyes a pale, greenish brown. In the dim light from the window she could see the demon in them, staring through her and past her, at hell.

"El reverendo says I must believe in divine grace." He turned away from Iris and knelt beside his bed facing his cross. "Perdoname Dios mio, Perdoname Dios mio, perdoname Dios mio."

The murmur of his endless prayer followed her all the way down the stairs to the front door. She didn't find the boy so she let herself out without saying goodbye or thanking him.

Iris was late. Rodolfo was well into his opening report. She walked down the aisle, squatted before the podium and took yet another photogaph of Rodolfo speaking. She turned and photographed the people who filled most of the folding chairs lined up in rows in the storefront, sat on top of the literature tables along the side walls, and stood in the front of the gated glass windows that were half blocked by stacks of back issues of REDENCION. She nodded greetings to the living and acknowledged the gaze of the martyrs peering from their frames on the walls.

"We live in momentous times." Rodolfo stood on the balls of his feet as the spoke, leaned forward, agitated his small fists. "The seesaw of history, its balancing fulcrum, is casting a huge arc: Remember Panama, but also remember Mandela."

She caught sight of Jorge just as he turned from his seat close to the front, to catch her eye. In France they'd invented a way of thinking that had left Marx behind. She let Rodolfo's words cleanse her of the blasphemy.

Inside the cocoon of her blanket Iris slowed her breathing. She had taught herself to breathe slowly, to float her gaze, to parade the moments of her life crossectioned inside glass.

She stands in the door frame, her hands clenched, her feet spread wide. She holds her shoulders stiff and stares straight ahead. Ada stands behind her, protected from Mama's wrath by Iris's body. Iris takes all the blows. Iris knows how. She feels Ada's terror and fixes her gaze on Mama's breasts, rising as he raises her arm over her head, lowering as the arm comes down for the blow. She will not show pain. Iris stands inside this armor that gives her absolute power over Mama. No blow can penetrate her. She takes herself in her mind to the green room. The empty green room. There, she towers over Mama and it is Mama who must cringe. There she lifts her arm against Mama and he hits her again, again, again. She watches the buttons of Mama's blouse go up and down each time she raises her arm for a blow. She feels nothing except Ada's terror.

Iris's bedroom is never fully dark until Mama turns the lights out in the living room, in the hallway, in the bathroom. Light makes a rectangle above the door where the air vent is kept partly open by layers of paint. Light makes a thin line under the door that widens like a fan as the floor slants.

Now the light has been gone for a long time. She holds her little sister Ada in her arms like in the pictures of Mary and Christ. She cradles Ada until the small body releases fear and melds into her arms. She feels Ada's halting breath become her sleep breath. Mama may not know how to love Ada, but Iris does. She lowers Ada gently onto her pillow, lies alongside her sister, and feels her sister's bird heart flutter against her own heart. She listens. Mama has stopped her frantic houseworking. She sleeps. Now it is safe to leave the green room.

This is the hour Iris waits for all day long. She knows the house sounds that usher in her time and she floats in the peade of Mama's absence.

She hears a creak and recognizes the sound of the window gate's accordion being pulled open. Iris must not have locked it after playing on the fire escape with Ada before Mama got home from her job as floor lady of a dress factory. She hears a scraping and recognizes the sound of the window being pushed up. She hears sneakered feet thud. She and Ada call Mama's window the turnstile because the junkies come in and out, in and out. She tiptoes down the hall to Mama's room. She stands in the darkness of the hall and watches through the slit of Mama's door.

A young man holds one hand over Mama's mouth. Mama's arms flail. She scratches at his face. She elbows him in the belly. She's protecting the dresser drawer where she's got a full month's pay. Mama breaks free and punches the boy's ribs and chest. Iris sees terror on his face. The light from the street lamp glistens on the knife. She doesn't see when the knife goes in, only when the boy pulls it out, only to plunge it again, into the middle of Mama's chest. He drops Mama, and then he pulls the knife out. He wipes it on Mama's flowered bed sheet. He walks right to the drawer, the middle one, where the money is. He steps onto the fire escape. She sees his legs climb up. It's true then, what Mama always says. The junkies come over the rooftops. only now does she notice Ada standing beside her.

She falls to the floor, hides inside the invisible armor and takes herself back to the green room. She doesn't see the changes of the light, the growing island of blood on Mama's sheet, her sister standing beside her. She doesn't hear the telephone. She doesn't feel Ada clutch at her nightgown nor hear her go silent. She is still standing there when the police break down the door. She never learns how the police got there. She lets Dona Elsa, the neighbor, lead her and her sister out of the apartment and into her own kitchen.

Iris did not look up when Chus reported he'd obtained the weapon. She knew he had obtained it by borrowing it from her who was not supposed to have one, to still have one, but was supposed to have given up all personal weapons to the Party when she joined. She did not. She was sorry she'd given it up now. For years she'd kept the gun wrapped in Mama's bloody nightgown, unused. She didn't know how to use the gun well. Carlos and she had driven upstate for target practice. It had suited her to imagine herself a woman who knew how to use a firearm. The lover or Carlos the urban guerrilla had been given the honored job of obtaining a weapon for them, Iris, Carlos, Papo, when they dubbed themselves Knight Rebels and took on what later she later learned in the Party was adventurism, barely a shade above street crime. How she'd bought the magnum was still her secret. Not even Ada had heard the story. She'd loved to imagine herself shooting. She'd hated to fire the gun. She could not make herself forget what the gun was for. She had been shocked by its size and weight and stunned by its recoil when she fired. The force lifted her hand straight up.

Chus, Millo and Jose pointed to places on the block by block diagram of the Barrio, just as Carlos and Papo had done on the blueprint of the Banco Isleno years ago. Iris feigned interest now, the way she had done then. She leaned forward, focused her eyes intensely on whatever target the men signaled, nodded her head, mimicked the excitation in the eyes of the men.

Why had the Party assigned her to this unit? Photographs and news articles were forbidden here. Would they ever really carry out a military action (not adventurism)? She wondered what the thinkers in France might have to say. She was still planning murders in Marx' name.

She looked straight overhead at the sooty skylight much higher than a church dome. This abandoned warehouse Jose had procured for their unit must at some time have been used to store bacalao, because now, again, she got the sour fishy whiff.

Inside the cocoon of her blanket Iris forced her breathing to slow down. She willed herself to breathe. She tucked the blanket under her feet. "I am safe. I am safe. I am safe." I have drawn so many fears and I have made so many fears I will never be done fearing and fear will never be done making me fear. She saw the agate greenness of the demon man's eyes.

"I am safe. I am safe. Nothing can hurt me here."

She opened her eyes onto the darkness of her bedroom. She stared at the gated window, the lush avocado tree on her sill. Through the soot streaked panes she saw the fire escape. She stared until her gaze softened and the gray light mottled. Her two eyes became one. She was all eyes, only eyes and breath. She pulsed. She was energy encased in soft parchment. Her abdomen rose and fell.

She resorped to the stillness of the girl in the green room. Ada's stillness. She saw the whole of their stillborn lives in crossection, one life between them, each crossection one moment, each moment one crossection. The moments were flat, sheer, held in glass. Their essence was that stillness. This was not others' essences. Others' essences were engaged, quickened, serrated like gears, enmeshed. But not theirs. Theirs was still, impenetrable, unpenetrating.

I am safe here. Nothing can hurt me. I am safe here, repeated a thread of this quickened parchment that was her self.

Iris drove the green van. Most times she liked driving. Many Fridays when the regular driver was away she volunteered to drive the bundles of REDENCION to the Party Committees. But this was not Friday. This was one in the morning on a Wednesday. The magnum lay on the seat beside her, loaded. Chus, Millo and Jose sat in the back of the van. She felt the force of their excitation. There had been air strikes on the Island. She was driving them all to the Armory. This was a retaliatory strike, the first time for the Party in the City.

She pulled over on a side street alongside the stone armory building so like a child's drawing of a castle. Chus and Millo eased out the back of the van. She kept the motor running, her foot on the brake. She looked at her digital watch and counted the seconds while they executed their well-rehearsed placing of explosives on the armory gate. She heard them close the van's back door 30 seconds under target. She drove. A small distance away Jose detonated the charge. She knew the explosion would be jut big enough to burst open the metal door and no stronger. Those three militants were veterans of the Island War, well trained by the City Force.

By dawn another Unit would have made the anonymous phone call to the media. Other units would have dropped hundreds of leaflets from Barrio rooftops calling el Pueblo to storm the armory.

She dropped each man off in turn at the appropriate corner they had carefully determined on the big map of the Barrio. She took the van to the warehouse, put the magnum in her bag, and walked outside. She was picked up by another car two blocks away at the appointed second.

She was putting the key into her lock when she heard the first sirens. She knew that by then the armory would have been well looted. Gangs, revolutionaries, provocateurs and adventurers of the Barrio were now armed, ready for the Uprising, even Carlos and Papo who'd gone underground when she went into the Party.

She stood by her blind window with the gun in her hand and noticed for the first time she was trembling. She had been trembling. Her womb fell in her, as in a roller coaster, at the recollection of Carlos coming in her after an action. "I loved him." Her own voice in the empty room startled her.

She stood unmoving by the window waiting for dawn. Carlos had sent her with the magnum to the Banco Isleno. She waited by the entrance where Carlos had shown her on the blueprint she must wait. She'd watched as Papo watched her from a pay phone on the street corner.

Carlos never came. She clutched the bag in her pocket with the note. Carlos never came. She watched the bank guard eye her, move toward her. Her gaze held the guard's for an instant. He was a young, thin Islander. In his eyes she read his recognition of her intention. She spun on her heel, walked outside past Papo inside the phone booth, not looking, turned the corner, and ran home.

Carlos never came. He left her alone in the bank to do the action, hold the bag, take the rap. What saved her? What led her to walk out rabbit stunned as she was? He never came. "I loved him." But he never came. He never loved. She relearned this truth with the same sharp pain she experienced each time she relearned it. He never loved. The thing that looked like love, talked like love, fucked like love, had not been love. He went underground. She joined the Party. Even Ada had not heard this story.

She wrapped the magnum inside mama's nightgown and hid it once again deep in the highest shelf of the hall closet where she kept Mama's relics. She stood on the kitchen chair and went through the quilted satin jewel box, no longer pink, now brittle. She touched mismatched earrings missing stones, the orange coral necklace Mama liked to wear to church, Mama's watch and wedding band. She read the dedication on the Bible the pastor of her Pentecostal church gave Mama when she professed her faith. El Senor todo lo puede. She held up the tortoise shell frame eyeglasses and looked through the big thick lenses. She kept the glasses because they looked like Mama's face.

Iris sat by the window in the green armchair that faced her sister's. Ada's gaze didn't register this intrusion into her visual field. Iris brought Ada a new yellow cotton blouse. She leaned toward her sister, raised her arms, removed the white shirt. She saw her sister's virgin breasts encased in pointy white cotton. She slipped the arms into the blouse and buttoned it. She combed her sister's just cut hair. She stroked her sister's face and peered into the flatness behind her eyes. She longed to hold her but when she placed her arms around her, she wouldn't meld. She told Ada about the thinkers in France. She told her in a whisper about the violated armory. She told her about Carlos. She stared at her sister and after a while she sobbed.

Iris rearranged the clutter on her desk in the small back room of the REDENCION office. She stacked half-finished articles, file folders, back issues of REDENCION, clippings from the bourgeois press. This clutter was always in motion, never begun or ended. She pulled toward herself the wheeled cart with the computer she shared with Juancho whose hours she'd studied in order to avoid him. She sipped fresh early morning cafe con leche from the Island bakery on the corner. She set the cart so that she could look out the dirty window, or at the avocado on the sill, or at the window across the air shaft. She booted the computer and she wrote:

Please god forgive me, please God forgive me, Please God forgive me. The man said his faith exorcised demons that had led him to commit one murder every day before he was saved.

Across the air shaft The Neighbor raised the blind. Iris had never seen her face, only her venetian blinds, her clear, clean window, her tidy dark wood desk, her computer terminal, her many-buttoned telephone, her coffee mug, and her back bent over the desk. Iris checked her watch. Ten o' five. As always The Neighbor was punctual. Iris imagined that through these exact morning repetitions she'd come to know The Neighbor well.

She returned to her story. She returned to staring at The Neighbor. She discovered under her telephone the pile of pink phone message slips Juancho had left her. Seven messages all from Jorge saying call him. Who was Jorge?

I cannot stop praying very long. The demons will get me.

She recognized his voice. Jorge was the man who'd brought the news from France. "You're persistent." She liked how he said her name. "A drink at seven at El Bohio?" He agreed.

"You can't take away somebody's drugs if you don't give them something else," is the philosophy of Reverendo Isaac Acosta, founder of Los Hijos de Zion. "Who would you rather your son, your brother, your husband, your neighbor, be addicted to, drugs or God?"

She walked down the interminable aisle. She felt eyes upon her. The many faces on the many bodies on the many metal chairs turned toward her. Ahead she saw only the red satin banner hanging above the dais. The faces of the Leadership Commission members blurred. She approached. She arrived. Her hand was shaken by the Party Secretary. The armory action, although clandestine, had earned her this office.

Later at the dance after the Congress closed, dazzling yellow light was all Iris remembered of her induction and her first meeting of the Leadership Commission. Light was all she saw as she danced with Jorge. "I'm Jorge. Remember me?" He'd taken her hand and pulled her to the dance floor. "You made a date for drinks but you stood me up." He spun her and she let him. She let the fast music, all horns and percussion, fill her head. He didn't let her dance with anyone else. "Wait for me." He went for one last drink.

Through her sootblack bedroom window she saw the single yellow eyeball of the streetlamp. They didn't speak as he undressed her. There was no kiss. He entered her from behind, standing. His entering burned. She stared at the single yellow eyeball of the street lamp. He gyrated her hips with his hands.
"Stop!." She didn't notice her mind form this word, didn't expect to hear her voice say it.
"Stop! Stop!."
And he did. She stepped away and turned to face him.
"But I thought you wanted this? The way you pressed your hips into me. I thought you wanted it like this."
"Stop. Stop. Stop." She whispered the word and watched him fix his pants and smooth his hair. She walked him to the door. "My mistake." She smiled and shook his hand. "Nothing personal." She leaned against the closed and bolted door and listened to his footsteps running down the stairs.

Iris studied which fixed point held Ada's gaze. She drew her own green armchair toward her sister's and put herself in Ada's line of sight. She told her Jorge had at last stopped leaving messages. She searched for a stirring in Ada's flat gaze. She read aloud from REDENCION.

"Please God forgive me, please God forgive me, please God forgive me."

Iris looked up at her sister's window. She took the front page of REDENCION with the black ARMORY LIBERATED headline, crumpled the sheet, and wet it at the corner sink. She rubbed the wet newspaper on the window. Soot and black ink teared on the glass. She wiped the blackness with the threadbare white towel, crumpled another sheet and rubbed the glass until it squeaked. She pulled the window open the few inches the side screws allowed, reached her arm around and scrubbed the outside as far as she could reach. From the corner of her eye Iris thought she saw Ada's gaze shift. Iris sat back in her green chair and studied the effect of her labor on the window. She'd cleaned a heart shaped section of the glass. Crumpled wet sheets of newspaper lay strewn on the floor. All that was left of REDENCION was the single centerfold sheet with her photographs of the barren street, the bone gray building. Iris read.

"I've killed you many times," the Demon Man said.

Ada laughed. Iris didn't register or recognize the rusty sound.

"I walked behind you and killed you from the back with a knife."

Ada laughed.

"I walked before you and killed you from the front with a gun."

Ada laughed.

This laughter resembled the laughter of the living. Iris was quiet and still Ada laughed.

She squeezed beside her sister and held her laughing sister like the pieta paintings. She felt Ada's body meld. She held her sister's gaze and in her eyes she saw herself. Ada laughed.

The Other Mother

On the other side walk, heading the other way toward the park, was the Other Mother. Sara pushed her own stroller straight ahead into its own shadow. She fixed her gaze straight ahead and downward. Secret Sara was lost in longing for the old Pepe who used to blurt out, "My love," while they made love, who once whispered right before he came, "I want to merge with you." If Sara had no peripheral vision she wouldn't have seen the Other Mother at all. Even as she looked away Sara noticed in great detail what the Other Mother was doing. Dana was in a dialogue of smiles and eye twinkles with her baby who sat in a pink sunbonnet in one of those strollers where the baby faces the mother and not the world.

Dana had lost all her pregnancy weight and her blondish hair was cut in flattering layers. She pictured Dana wearing a purple mohawk and a safety pin for an earring. The Other Mother used a diaper service and real diaper pins. Secret Sara whispered, 'As for myself, I aspire to becoming a woman unhinged. I long for the day when my child will be but one more accident of my existence and I run into him as another free human being. O God, don't let the other mother see me.'

"Sara, Sara." Dana called, and waved as she pushed the stroller across the street. Sara stood inside a tree's patchy shade. Dana leaned into the shade to kiss Sara on the cheek. Sara gazed at the moving patches of shade on the cracked sidewalk and squirmed.

"You look great." Dana patted Sara's inch long black hair. Sara nodded. She could see Little Joey's green teething shit leaking from his paper diaper onto his blue stretchy. "Really terrific. You're losing weight! Is Joey sleeping through the night?" Dana looked at Joey, smiled and twinkled her eyes. "Funny, Lotty never gets diarrhea when she teethes. I never know she's teething until the tooth is out." She bent down to adjust the pink bonnet. "I've been meaning to call you. I'm organizing a child care co-op. Bringing Lotty to the office isn't working now that she's crawling."
Sara nodded. "I've got to run. I want to get home before Joey wakes up. He'll want to nurse the minute he opens his eyes. Call me."

She pushed the baby away fast. The green fold up umbrella stroller clattered as it bounced over the tree roots that had broken up the side walk. Secret Sara took a deep, long breath. O gorgeous Spring. Behold the blooming green tips. This is the life! She had survived an encounter with the Other Mother! She lifted the stroller onto her hip and climbed the stoop steps two at a time.

The darkness of the house engulfed her. She took in a deep breath of the musty, sweet, old paper scent of the living room. Joey opened his eyes. He screamed. She unstrapped him from the stroller with her left hand, undid the front snap on her nursing bra with the right. "Quick, quick." She whispered into his ear. "Before you wake up your Father."

She plunged into the cane seat rocking chair. Joey found the nipple. He relaxed only slightly his muscular, wiry body against his Mother's bony arm. Mother and son locked in a sinewy embrace. She pictured Dana and Lotty in a puddle of symbiotic nursing bliss. Lotty, Dana had often pointed out, was very good at molding. High achievement at an early age!

Sara pictured a sunny rock in a stream,clear..no..cloudy and fecund. She took comfort in the muddy, moist life of the salamanders underneath the rock, was filled with the yellow light that filled the turtle sunning on the rock.

Joey tugged on the other breast. Sara moved the now superbly molded baby onto her other arm and eased his milk rimmed lips onto the full breast.

Sara ran her fingers through her short, nearly black hair. She missed the Princess Leah coils she used to make over each of her ears. Pepe was angry when she cut her hair but taking care of it was one more thing she didn't have time for. She hung huge filigree earrings from her ear lobes, considered lipstick, forgot about it when Joey cried. Up from sleep. Again. She held Joey clamped onto her nipple, with one arm. She glanced at the bed. Pepe was still asleep. Lucky he could sleep through almost anything because it wasn't pleasant when he woke up before he was ready. Life would be much easier if he didn't work nights.

With her free hand she dumped pampers, a change of clothes, some small bright plastic toys (small manipulables Dana called them), into the canvass bag with the stenciled signs for DIAPER and BOTTLE, Dana's small gift for Joey at the baby shower (along with the very same yellow booties Sara had given her for her oldest boy two years ago! Surprisingly Dana was organized enough to recycle a gift but not to keep track of where she first got it!). Dana had also chipped in with three others mothers from the Women's Center she ran, for a complete set of those expensive baby toys, the ones with red plastic frames, colorful interchangeable hanging gadgets and enormous screws and bolts Sara managed to lose early in Joey's infancy.

She fought Secret Sara's urge to crawl into bed next to Pepe and tuck Little Joey in between them. "My little husband," Secret Sara whispered to Little Joey. "Joey, my Little Husband, Pepe my Big Baby."

She hoped Pepe would be able to manage his dinner on his own. She put the banana shaped magnet on the note spelling out the whereabouts of the tofu, rice and red beans Pepe was not home in time to eat for dinner last night. In the old days when she still taught literacy four mornings a week at the Women's Center, before she'd become a full time Mother to everyone in the house, Pepe used to cook half the days of the week. That was before role correction surgery, Sara thought. She propped the back pack on the armchair, slid Joey feet first into it, sat on the floor to ease her arms into each strap and shift the pack onto her back.

Other mothers and a few enlightened fathers crowded Dana's living room. Most of them Sara knew by sight from the park, or knew better from the old days because they dropped in at the Women's Center before Sara had fallen into the time warp of motherhood. She reached behind her, found one of Joey's hands inside the back pack and fondled it. "It's fine, Secret Sara told him.You're perfect. It's not your fault."

One of the fathers rushed from his seat to help pull Joey from Sara's shoulders. As he pulled off the backpack he knocked off one of Sara's earrings. Everyone laughed, even Joey, who was crawling to the tangle of babies gathered on a rug in the center of the floor around a wealth of small manipulables.

"Now where did I read that children under two don't socialize?" Sara said and everyone laughed. Secret Sara was amazed by her witticism.

"Their mothers certainly can," said another mother who introduced herself as Meg and moved over on the couch to make room for Sara. The other mothers all laughed.

Dana pressed a cup of mint tea into Sara's hand and pointed to the honey pot on top of the book case. Books on every row were so tightly wedged no infant could dislodge one.

"I think just about everyone is here," Dana looked at each person as she spoke and everyone fell silent and gave her full attention. Sara studied Dana. "Let's start with self-introductions. Say your name and your baby's name." She was as self-assured here as she was running support groups for women at the Center. More than likely Dana didn't require fantasies of salamanders to get through her day, Secret Sara thought. Sara watched Joey crawling with the other babies. "A life of his own already!" Meg had volunteered to go first and now it was her turn. "Sara and Joey." Secret Sara shuddered at the sound of her own voice.

Dana asked whoever had ideas of how a child care co-op should run to speak. Soon enough Dana would get on to the business of telling them all what to do.

"Maddy and I concluded if we were going to have quality child care for Max we were going to have to do it ourselves. We're ready to go on this project." Brian, the one who knocked off Sara's earring, squeezed Maddy who was nestled alongside him, moldably plump in a green jumper with snap-on shoulder straps for quick access to the nursing breast.

"I'm interested in parental presence in the classroom. " Maddy added.
Meg leaned forward in her chair. "My baby-sitter watches the soaps all day and I'm afraid Katie's getting stupid."
"When I checked out infant centers one was arranged like a hospital ward and there was only one toy in sight," said Kathy.
Her husband Murray broke in. "One of those hexagonal things with a string you pull to get animal sounds. No way we're putting Laura in a place like that."
"It's a nightmare." Patty stood to speak. "I'm tired of telling Clark if we don't get some decent child care there's no way I'm going back to work. I'll stay with Pedro."
"Ellen and I are doing OK with role reversal," Roy said. "I've been home with Tania for six months. Ellen's a lawyer and she can make better money anyway." He grinned and Ellen stared straight at the floor.
Dana was looking straight at her so Sara said. "I'm an observer. I came because Dana asked me seven times." The others laughed. "I don't know what I want."
Dana nodded. "I see we have a lot of common concerns." She looked at each person in the room. "I've done a lot of thinking already so if it looks like I'm being pushy I want everyone to tell me so."

She produced a pad of graph paper with several budgets worked out: paying scale wages, hiring elderly people and high school kids, hiring illegal aliens, and then several combination.

"The hieroglyphs of my obsession." She flipped page after page of graph paper covered in tiny print.

'Clearly she's got a vision and will lead all of us to the promised land of a day care co-op,' Secret Sara thought.

Sara and Meg walked into the spring night together.

"You don't mind walking home alone?" Sara said. "It never used to bother me until I had Joey. I never thought much about my safety. I never used to care if I went home alone at two in the morning. I had my systems. I'd walk down the middle of the street. I had a special posture, very straight and shoulders squared, I thought would make muggers think I wasn't scared."

Meg looked down at the red haired top of Katie's head in the stroller and shook her head. "You mean all the burglaries? Criminals have their M.O.s you know. That's what my husband Tony says. A burglar's M.O. is not a mugger's is not a rapist's."

I didn't mean anything specific. I just meant fear of free-floating unidentified danger." Sara stopped. "Well. Here's my corner. Nice to meet you Meg."

As Sara walked down her block secret Sara thought of Hansel and Gretel. She pictured white, chunky bread crumbs. The sparrows and gulls would surely see to it that no child would ever find the way back home. she walked quickly in the dim gray light that passed for night's darkness. Am I witch, stepmother, Hansel, Gretel or the Wood cutter? Secret Sara thought.

Pepe sat on the couch watching cops and robbers on TV. Sara pecked him on the cheek. He wore black pants and a black t-shirts and black basketball shoes. He'd even painted the soles black.

"You look hungry." Sara kneeled in front of him and he lifted Joey in the carrier off her back. Joey's joy at seeing his daddy squirmed through his whole body. Pepe lifted Joey up in the air and then sat his laughing baby on his lap. Big and Little gazed for a few seconds into each other's eyes.

"I made myself an omelet and left some on the stove for you."

Sara stood nearby until Pepe handed Little back. What bliss to have him in her own arms! She scooted to the bedroom, lay him on the dresser top that served as his changing table, changed his diaper, bundled him into a faded blue sleeper from the Center's Baby Exchange. He looked endearing, edible. Was there anything as beautiful as the human baby? She made him a throne of pillows in the middle of the conjugal bed. she dressed in one of the granny nightgowns she'd slit down the front. Secret Sara curled up with her Little Husband. Enmeshed in their nursing bond Sara and Joey drifted to sleep. Later when he came home from work Big might return Little to his crib.

The Other Mother had a fortress gate face with bars for teeth; an iron mouth. Red lips! Pepe walked stealthily on her roof; his black sneakers stuck on roof tar.

The pang of Sara's terror caught on the edge of Joey's wail. He groped for the nipple in the dark. The bed was moist with their sweat, a marsupial sack. In the night silence Sara heard the absence of Pepe's breath. Not home yet. She did not open her eyes.

Inside the kangaroo sack Secret Sara recalled with alarm the look on Dana's face when she'd said at the meeting that she didn't know what she wanted to do about child care. How did the Other Mother always know the script, what came next in the story, what to do? In her half sleep Secret Sara saw the Other Mother's face slam her away like an iron-barred door. The Other Mother's self peered out through the eye holes in her face.

But not Meg. Meg felt like her best friend in grade school. She shrugged. Who cared? Let them all switch me on or off, Secret Sara thought. My life is their soap and I am the heroine. She laughed.

Secret Sara lives square framed scenes.

The camera zooms on her asleep, wallowing between the puddly sheets, inhaling the pissy smell of her Little Husband.

Now a quick cut to the muddy stream: the mother salamander's infant curls against the wet maternal belly.

A sound.

A burglar enters the heroine's home?

What a lovely home! A lovely life! Suspense. But no. It is only the heroine's husband who works night reentering the grainy image on the screen with its dark French film shadows to confer weight, significance, reality.

The camera pans onto the ancient Chinese vase, the antique brass figurines of dancers, the electronic artifacts: six inch TV; so many toasters! The soundtrack, inexplicably, is jungle sounds. There is a wild beast screech.

The husband pushes in the door, removes his black gloves and black watch cap, surveys in the mirror the matte dark skin of his face. Off camera is the sound of a bathtub filling. Mother and infant stir.

The husband emerges from the bathroom in well worn white sweat pants and t-shirt. Close up of the tired, gaunt face. A grimace of pain. The audience, those peering perfect selves, intuit he's pulled a muscle or pinched a nerve. They watch the catlike motions of the gorgeous male who walks to the window, opens it, breathes deeply and fills his lungs with the night air.

Still facing the window he walks onto the straw mat by the conjugal bed. The nursing couple stirs.

The man salutes the sun (It can be seen rising through the slanted shutters of the East window.) He raises his arms, bends forward, steps his left foot back, arches, grazes his chest against the floor, rises again. His moves are smooth and slowly the jungle sounds fade into a cricket symphony.

The man lies in savasana for endless moments and then turns onto his belly. He arches his chest back into the cobra, raises his legs into the locust and turns for forward bends. He moves slowly. His breathing is smooth and continuous like the breath of tides and cells. He winds his legs and twists his long supple spine. He wedges elbows into thorax and balances into a perfect peacock. He places his head in the triangle of his arms, raises his legs and holds steady a perfect head stand. He stays there. For the viewers this is an endless wait.

Cut to the dining room downstairs. The camera pans the objects on the shelves: toasters, walkmans, tape decks, a jade Buddha.

Cut to our hero, still in the headstand. Upside down his matte brown face is serene. Slowly, slowly, he descends. He winds his legs around his neck. He sits in a full lotus. He breathes. Day has broken. Stripes of light filter through the shutters and glaze with tiger stripes and prison bars our hero, our heroine, the infant and their lair.

Pepe lifted little Joey from between pink satin sheets. The diamond in his pink ring flashed. Sara squeezed shut her eyes and turned away from him. He smelled of patchouli oil. Sara heard the crib springs creak as Big placed Little in the crib. She felt the heat of Pepe's just bathed naked skin.

"Is this the mother who likes to fuck?" His whisper made Joey stir. "Shhh. You'll wake him." Pepe caressed the nipples of the milk heavy breasts. "This is the Mother who used to like to fuck." Sara caught his wrist. "My breasts hurt when you do that." He laughed. "Well, then, is this the Mother who likes to wrestle?" He pushed Sara on her back and pinned her arms flat." How I hate that throaty laugh, Secret Sara thought. Pepe felt between her legs and found her moist. How snug he was inside me before Little Joey. Now I barely feel him. Secret Sara crawled under the salamander rock. "You glow." Pepe spoke into her ear. "You flow." Hot sweat on satin. An ocean between her legs. He suckled mouthfuls of milk. The salamander burrowed into the soft mud and went to sleep.

Little Joey fed himself a mouthful of sand, caught Sara's eye and laughed.

"Just ignore him," Dana said. Secret Sara told her to fuck herself. You wouldn't ignore it if it was Lotty, she thought. Sara jumped up from the railroad tie bordering the sand lot, ran to Joey, rushed him to the water fountain. The shadows of tree leaves quivered on the sandy pavement.

"A bit of sand won't hurt him. He wants attention." Dana handed him a shovel. "We're making progress on the co-op. The space at the church may be certified and now I think Brian's brought the report from the hiring committee." Brian sat on the railroad tie just beyond Dana. "Look. Little Joey's eating sand." He reached down and took hold of Joey's hand. The baby raised his face up to him and laughed. "I didn't bring the report from the hiring committee." Dana fixed him with her supervisor glance. "Well then who's giving the report from the hiring committee?"

"I'm spacing out." Sara leaned closer to Meg who was watching Katie pour sand with a paper coffee cup.

"Maddy's got the report." Brian looked away from Dana and at the other mothers. "She's got it in her computer at work."

"Sara gave Katie a second paper cup. "I can barely stay awake." She pointed to the circles under her eyes. Meg gave her a worried smile. "Joey keeping you up?" Sara looked away. "Joey and his Dad. He works nights. That's why he never makes it to the meetings." Katie climbed up onto Meg's lap and patted her chest. "My husband works nights too." She raised her blouse and eased Katie onto the breast.

Maddy had arrived and sat perched on Brian's knee with her bare feet in the sand. She read the names of three teachers who'd responded to the notices on the Women's Center bulletin board. "Anybody who wants to can read the resumes." She waved papers in the air. "I need volunteers who can interview them next Monday afternoon." Roy, free because of his role reversal, said he was available and so was Patty because Clark volunteered to watch babies for anyone who was willing to interview.

And now Dana had to leave. She had another meeting at the Center. A few parents swarmed her as she left. Others collected babies and sneakers, shook sand off little feet, strapped infants into strollers, hung them in slings and carriers and propped them into backpacks.

"It's Sara's turn to host the meeting next." Dana marched off with Lotty in her mother facing stroller and two mothers on each side.

Sara nodded while Secret Sara shook her head. She pulled Joey's sandy fist from his mouth and eased him into the umbrella stroller. She walked quickly away before Meg was done wiping Katie's feet and strapping her into the stroller; before Meg could volunteer what her husband did at night and ask about Pepe.

Sara watched closely as the squared of chocolate melted into the butter in the cast iron frying pan. Behind her at the kitchen table Pepe ate an enormous mound of alfalfa sprouts and red lettuce with carrot dressing and another huge mound of rice and gandules.

She poured flour into a bowl, cracked an egg and stirred it into the flour, poured sugar into the melted brown mess. She licked the spoon. "Brownies for the meeting."

Pepe looked up from his bowl and stopped chewing.

"We're having the baby co-op meeting here today. Maybe you can stay."

He rose and walked quickly and soundlessly into the dining room. He began putting toasters, tape decks and video recorders inside the drawers and behind the doors of the breakfront.

"I never thought you minded the mess." She poured the batter into the tin and set it in the middle of the oven rack.

Sara passed brownies around. It was simple, really. Was there any reason she and Pepe never had people over? We stew in our own juice. Secret Sara let out sigh. It's as if we were hiding out, had some secret.

"Look, Joey's got those jacks in his mouth." Dana bent down and pried a jack from his hands. Joey looked up and laughed. Pepe walked on the silent balls of his stocking feet to his son, lifted him from the antique Persian rug, stuck his finger into Joey's mouth and took out the tape deck jack. He lifted Joey into the air.

Sara offered Dana a brownie and watched her checking everything out. Dana shook her head. "What the hell. I feel rebellious." She took a brownie anyway.

"We're lucky to have the two fathers who haven't made it to our meetings here today. Dana pointed to Pepe and Tony. "Here they are at last, the guys who work nights." She beamed at the two men who sat at opposite ends of the dining table stretched to the fullness of its two extra panels. Tony nodded. Pepe rolled his eyes. Lithe, brown Pepe sat hump shouldered, his head swallowed by his huge blue t shirt. Tony stared at him and at the empty shelves littered with jacks and bits of wire, at the Chinese vase in the center of the table.

Dana spread sheets of graph paper on the table. "Here are the figures. One certified teacher, two grandmas, two high school girls. And the Parents will do volunteer shifts."

Everyone nodded.

"The space in the church fell through but Sara's offered the co-op the use of the ground floor here for the first six months just so we can get started.

Pepe glared at his wife. She smiled and offered him a brownie.

The babies slept on foam mats on the floor. In sleep, they crawled together and nested spoon like into each other: Lotty and Joey, Katie and Max, Laura, Tania and tiny Pedro. Sara and Meg hung Sara's laundry in the yard and watched the napping babies through the window.

The bright red cardinal swooped into the feeder. His brownish spouse swooped after him. Pigeons scratched their claws and wings on their metal feeding tray atop the fire escape of the high-rise beyond the back fence. The wind flapped the queen sized red satin sheets Sara had hung. The clothesline squeaked. Sara watched the shadows of the bird wings among the shadows of the sheets. Meg's face was half hidden by the shadows. She folded Sara's dry laundry on the picnic table.

"There's always some sign of a man's true character." Meg folded a huge black satin sheet. "You've got to be willing to see it and most of the time you'd rather not. You'd rather see what you want to see." Sara nodded and pinned one corner of a flapping crib sheet. "So you ended up marrying a cop." Meg stacked folded the pillow cases. "And that's after I said I'd never marry a guy who'd never be home." Meg folded T-shirts. "Tony never ate egg-yolks intact, only stirred up. If I gave him an egg that wasn't scrambled he broke into a cold sweat. Shouldn't that have told me something?" Still, I didn't see." She peered through the bars at the sleeping tangle of infants."

"Well, I picked Pepe because he ate health food and did yoga and took baths with drops of olive oil in the water for his skin and he seemed much better than my boyfriend just before him who couldn't stop drinking beers once he'd had one. He was sweet but crazy. Not just a recluse like Pepe. I mean crazy crazy. One night he told me he was late because he'd been secretly advising Fidel Castro on global strategy. Pepe seemed down to earth. He took me for a hike in the woods. He turned over stones and showed me salamanders." Sara handed Meg another sheet to fold. "But would you believe that crazy as that boyfriend was he could make love? He was the ultimate master of the missionary. I'd always thought that was one sure fire way to tell about a man. I thought they just couldn't fake it. I mean think of the thousands of cues and messages and negotiations involved in good sex."

Meg shook her head. "Sometimes I get so tired of being somebody else's good luck."

One baby screamed. One of the grandmas, Sofia, rushed in from her lunch break. The other baby voices joined the chorus.

"That's why you tried the old way with Tony, marriage and all?" Sara wiped her hands and began walking toward the house. Meg nodded and sighed. "All that and then I discovered I was mostly alone anyway." She lifted the basket stacked with laundry, hefted it to the back screen door and walked inside.

Alone for a moment in the yard Sara stared at the flapping sheets. Pepe insisted sun dried laundry was healthier. One more sheet to hang and then she'd be off to the health food store to get Pepe the calcium magnesium he needed for his nerves. Why was he so on edge these days?

Secret Sara and Little Joey nestled in the marsupial bed. Joey suckled. She dreamed Pepe was a Mormon and she and Meg were his wives. While he was gone all night and slept by day she and Meg hung laundry together and cooked dinner. They talked in another language Sara the dreamer didn't understand. "That is the language of the perfect words," the dream voice said.

The absence of Pepe's sounds of return roused Sara at three in the morning. Joey slept flat on his back. Milk had dried and made a pattern of fine white webs around his lips. The shutters cast shadow stripes on him. "Tiny smiling jungle beast." She smiled and watched him breathe.

She remembered her dream and held her breath. Pepe walked stealthily on the Other Mother's roof. His feet stuck in tar. Another man came up behind him. Pepe let out a shrill rabbit scream. The other man was Tony.

Sara pulled Joey closer. She pulled up the satin sheet to her chin. She wrapped the down pillow around her ears. Secret Sara peered under the cool rock at the salamanders who'd fashioned pillows from wet mud and mosses. Their tiny hearts pounded.

In the moonless night Pepe's figure, dressed in black, vanished among shadows of water tanks, pigeon coops and roof sheds. He stumbled on a row of basil plants in cans. He went on, sure-footed, several feet forward, over the wall to the adjoining roof. The thud of Tony's huge body on the roof tar, the clank of the basil cans, echoed in the darkness. Pepe's eyes flashed like orange marbles. The two men locked gazes. Pepe's teeth flashed white. Tony leapt the low wall between the roofs. He lunged for a shadow. Pepe laughed behind him, close to the air shaft. Tony ran toward the laughter. He lunged again. Pepe ducked. Tony plunged over him into the air shaft. Pepe's hand missed the roof's edge. His own momentum swept him over into the free air. Their cries merged with each other's and with everyone's bad dreams.

Tell them I've given orders for another script, Secret Sara said inside Sara's head. Dana stared at Sara silent on the bed. She began to pull open the shutters but Sara shook her head. "Where's Meg?" Joey wailed. Sara lay motionless. Dana hesitated by the window. Sara stared at the wall straight ahead. Dana picked up Joey from the crib and held him against her chest. His cry grew louder. She lay him beside Sara on the bed.

"Did you forget the funerals are today?" Dana sat on the foot of the bed. She'd brought over her good black dress for Sara to wear.

Secret Sara ran over the foolish scene again in her head: The two men chasing around on a roof in the night; Tony's lunge; Pepe's duck; Tony's plunge; Pepe's fall. Her sobs frightened Joey into greater wails. Mother and son keened together unaware that Dana was watching them from the foot of the bed, waiting, letting Sara have a bit more time to cry before she dressed her and got her to the funeral on time.

"It's always so nice when the children have gone to bed." Meg spooned honey into her tea and pushed the jar sticky with peanut butter smears across their kitchen table to Sara. Sara dipped the spoon and drizzled honey into her cup. She stared through the kitchen door at the trees lit by the full moon. Sara's satin sheets and Meg's flannel sheets flapped in the wind.

"Sometimes I miss Pepe so much it hurts my bones." Sara sipped her chamomile tea. Meg nodded. "I know what you mean. I can't bear to scramble eggs."

Sara rose to put away the honey jar in the cupboard above the sink. "And then other times it seems almost nothing has changed at all." Meg put her arm around Sara's shoulders. "Just another kind of absence."

Slip of the Tongue
Vince was slipping.

Through her living room window Violet watched the lavender snow.

"Vince is slipping, Mom. He's slipping fast." Her son Roy had said over the phone last night. Funny that she heard the news from her son, her judgmental son. 'I thought you were a feminist. Mom. What are you doing taking up with a married man?" His words hurt. They resonated with her own nay-saying voices. She'd slapped Roy. Just about the only time she hit her son. He'd been all of 20. now at 32 he felt no shame at exploiting her relationship with Vince to advance as a corporate lawyer on the fast-track at Vince's old firm.

The snow had thickened but still was not blowing. It fell like blurry rain.

There was nothing to do but keep going, the same way she had kept going after Harry, good, old, selfish Harry had blown out his brains and gone off on his final sail in a closed casket. She pictured the casket dangling over the grave, floating on an invisible wave of air on that bright spring day. Why hadn't he just dropped everything he hated about his life (even her) and stuck with sailing. There were so many things one could do if nothing mattered enough to want to die. So many wonderful, meaningless things to do so much like dying.

Now it was Vince on his deathbed. She imagined him dying on his marital bed. She imagined an enormous king sized bed so big Vince and Vivian never touched each other in her fantasies. She saw him lying, shriveled from the tumor in his brain that must by now have sucked up all the fat, what there was of it, a little bit around the middle, along the triceps, in the inside of the thighs. Vince had always been lean, long limbed and hard muscled from the youthful athletics when he and Harry had gone out for track together in college light years ago.

Violet put her legs on the red hassock and stretched them. She settled into the brocade armchair. Through the translucent lavender curtains she saw the purple snow begin to swirl. Wind now. The snow had fallen all day. She'd watched. One hand clutched the bright red crochet square she had not advanced by one stitch, the other rested on her lap only inches from the white telephone sitting on the table by the stack of leaflets for the demonstration outside Ridge Hospital.

STOP STERILIZATION ABUSE NOW. The black letters floated on the long, pink sheets of paper. She hadn't gotten around to dropping the leaflets off at the usual places, the library, the College, the Women's Center. She pictured a sparse picket of the stalwarts. The young mothers. Dana, Sara, Meg, Magdalena. The phone clicked on. She heard her own voice answer, then a deep voice she didn't place at first. Dana. "I dropped two reams of paper at the Center. You'll have to call to schedule making copies of the fact sheet. Or get someone else to go in. Late evenings are the best time. Unless you raised the money to get it offset, then someone will have to get the paper over to FemPress. I'm wondering with the snow if we hadn't better call the picket off? Word's been out though, and people will be pissed if they show up and we don't. Better be consistent on a small scale. That's what you always say. Oh. Bring the networking sheets to the meeting."

Violet laughed. Dana could have all voices of a conversation by herself. She closed her eyes. This was one time she was not going to be redeemed by good, hard work. Those merciful, repetitive, endless, minuscule tasks had always delivered her to the next passage, reassured her of her own existence even when pain had blasted her out of body. One month to the day after Harry's death she'd gone back to teaching English at the Center and taken on the organization of the local chapter of the Island Solidarity Committee. She'd called meetings in the Presbyterian church basement, visited the usual progressives, talked the pastor into joining. She'd made phone calls, lobbied, leafleted, defused angels on the heads of pins debates. Selflessly. Her self had been eaten away by grief.

The call that Vince was dead would come if not this day then the next. She had been waiting for it for three weeks since the last time Vince had called when he was still well enough to call her himself.

The lavender snow sky turned to night's near gray darkness. The evergreen shrubs were weighted with thick snow shells. She entered the trance-like in between state, between one joy and the next, one connection and the next, one despair and the next, one miracle and the next. It was her ability to endure this state that had enabled her to survive. Yes. She had endured and survived Harry's death and now she would endure and survive Vince's.

The telephone rang. She raised the receiver to her ear. "This is Vivian. Someone wants to speak to you." In the pause she heard a distant, unintelligible conversation. She could barely recognize Vince's hello. She felt a shiver on the back of her neck where Vince would never kiss her again. "Vi come see me. It's fine by Viv."

"I'll get on the next plane."

She ran upstairs and tossed slacks, two sweaters, red yarn, needles, and the article she was writing comparing sterilization abuse patterns on the Island with those of Islanders in the City, into the overnight bag she'd had waiting on the armchair by her bedroom window since Roy's call. Vince had been sitting in that chair, his long arms stretching beyond the chair's arms, his legs crossed at the ankles on the bed the day maybe seven years ago when he told her he'd asked Vivian for a divorce.

"I said, Viv, I want a divorce." His gaze was fixed on the bird nest resting on the bookcase. "Viv just looked at me. She was wearing her mink stole. We were on our way to a benefit dinner for Legal Defense. She said, 'It's Vi, isn't it?' That's it. That's all she said. She'd never mentioned it before and she's never mentioned it since. That was six months ago. We've never discussed it again."

Violet imagined Vivian in her mink stole looking at Vince put on his dinner jacket. She pictured them walking in silence to their car and then talking to all the right people at the dinner. Seven years ago. After that Violet let divorce and marriage become just a running joke.

The uniformed doorman announced Violet into the telephone and nodded. She walked the marbled, glassed in lobby to the shining chrome doors of the elevator. Through the glass she saw a fountain with a sculpture of a mermaid in a little garden. "Six, please." She smiled at the elevator man, a short, dark Islander. She studied this man who saw Vince nearly every day. This man had a greater intimacy with Vince than she did, who'd seen him for one weekend a month, for twelve years, mostly indoors, mostly naked.

Vivian opened the wide door and stepped back to let her in. Her long silver hair was pulled back. Despite what must have been six months of pain watching Vince get ready to die, her narrow, serene face still glowed. She looked steady and wise the way she had even in the college days when Vince first introduced her to Harry and Vi. A white uniformed nurse crossed the hallway behind them and entered what must be the room that held Vince.

Vivian took Violet's tiny suitcase. "Your room is this way. She led the way down a carpeted hall. "You'll probably need more than this. You can use my things. We're about the same size, I think."

Violet followed Vivian's high-heeled footsteps muffled by the thick pale blue carpet. "You expect me to stay?" Violet's voice echoed in the resonant silence. The apartment felt suspended in an inhalation.

"He wants you here." Vivian turned to Vi with a smile. "His dying wish." She opened the door and motioned Vi into a room with white laquered bookshelves and a big white laquered desk. She pointed to a wide pale blue velvet divan. "It makes quite a comfortable bed." She set the suitcase on a pale blue velvet chair and drew the narrow slats of the pale blue blinds against the view of a mirrored high-rise glowing shell pink in the rising sun.

"You must be tired. You traveled all night. Vince fell asleep about an hour ago. Why don't you rest and I'll wake you as soon as he wakes up." She opened the doors of a white cabinet above the divan and took white blue striped sheets and a matching down quilt. The two women made the bed together in silence. "I'll have Isa bring you a cup of chamomile tea."

Vivian pried open the slats of the blinds and studied the shell pink building. Beyond them were rooftops and high-rises. Vince and Viv had lived in this condo in the City for years, even after he became semi-retired. That only meant he did less paid legal work and more pro bono; spent less time in the office and more time on his political work.

She kicked off her high heels and wiggled her stockinged toes into the thick blue pile. She breathed deep. She picked up the faint odor of Vince's pipe tobacco. "His study." Living alone so many years she was used to talking to herself out loud. The room was nothing like what she'd imagined. This was the room he sat in when he called her. She touched the pale-blue push button phone, the one he called her from. She sat in the blue swivel chair on which he must have sat through those long phone-calls, first daily during the early obsessed stage of their love affair, then monthly to announce his visits, and then in the early days of his panic at his illness, nearly every day again.

Carefully, as if her sounds could penetrate the walls and break the held-breath silence of Vince's apartment, she opened the top drawer of her desk. She sat abruptly, felled by the recollection of Harry at his own study that last spring morning, the top of his head blown away, the leather chair drenched in blood already brown and caked by the time she found him when she got back from her antiwar coalition meeting at the Women's Center. She had imagined Vince's study brown, leathery, manly in the unimaginative way she had set up Harry's. After all these years she still revisited with the same, sharp terror that last moment of the living Harry, that is, the Harry she'd expected to find still living when she pushed open his study door. Long ago she had stopped hoping she might ever forget, stopped trying to predict when the memory and the pain would lash her.

She held her chest and rocked forward and back. This too would pass. It had happened once when Vince was with her, soon after Harry's death, in the early days of their affair when Vince had undertaken to take care of her, make sure she invested Harry's insurance money(he'd contested and defeated the company's challenge of her benefit, because of the suicide), see that widowhood didn't land her in the poorhouse and unable to finish ushering the nearly grown Roy into adulthood.

He had watched her bending over with pain and made no attempt to intervene, no attempt to console, no attempt to touch her, to alter what could not be altered, what would be forever part of her. He witnessed. Then, when he saw the pain subside he played an old Aretha Franklin record from their school days together and he held her, after a while he slowly began to dance. He danced with her without saying a word, kissing her while they danced, undressing her while they danced, caressing her while they danced. He had gotten them both naked and then gotten himself into her as they stood.

That had been the solace and consolation and connection and closeness. It was enough. She'd known Vince such a long, long time. They had both just turned fifty as Harry would have if only he'd hung on to watch the tide rise again. It did, it always did. She remembered Vince full inside her, deep inside her, thrusting from behind as they both stood. "We're witness to the longevity of lust." He'd laughed. That laconic, lanky man, who would have suspected his passion? She would never cradle him in her legs again. The size of this thought was bigger than her mind. She closed her eyes and moaned softly.

In the top drawer there was nothing of interest. Maybe his interesting possessions were in the office he still kept in his old firm. Maybe he had none. There was a blank appointment book bound in brown, tooled leather. There were several pens, ball-points, gold pens, a black Mont Blanc.

Violet answered a soft knock at the door and accepted from the Islander houseworker, must be Isa, a tray with a pot of chamomile tea, bread, butter and guava marmalade. Violet wiped her tears and thanked her. Did Isa know she was Vince's mistress? The Other Woman. His other significant other. Had Vivian during all those years of regular monthly abandonment by Vince, late at night, confided across class lines the secret she might not confide to her peers? Surely Vivian could afford a therapist for her confessional needs. She set the food on the desk untouched. She longed for her own bedroom, her own bed, her own window, for the barren tree now weighted with thick white clumps of snow, the long lawn below it covered by sepulchral white.

Still fully dressed she stretched out on the divan beneath the blanket with the too crisp, too new cover. She closed her eyes onto the full blackness behind her eyelids that in seconds gave way to splotches of red and then the designs formed by her blood vessels that surely must be the origin of mandalas. She breathed slowly with her child birthing breath. So often in her life she'd had to birth her own next moment. She remembered the sting of Roy's head bursting from her. Life began and life ended. After Roy's birth this thought would pop up unbidden. She'd picture her own dead hand mummifying under the earth.

Soon Vince would breathe out his last breath, expire. She saw a running reel of images of her acquaintance with dear, humorless Vince paling at the college bar beside Harry's boisterous, manic joking; wedding serene Vivian at the botanic garden; writing contracts at his glass topped desk in his City law office; discovering himself to be a workaholic; exploiting his own addiction to work to become wealthy; revealing that first morning after their first night, when they made love long and slow this time on the bed she'd shared with Vince, how all his life he'd nursed a secret lust for her, his best friend's girl, then wife...Vince a breathless body, a rotting carcass dissolving...Ashes to ashes. Dust to dust.

She jumped up to answer a louder knock. Through the door Vivian said, "Vince wants to see you now." She opened Vince's door for Violet who stepped into the thick scent of disinfectant over a faint scent of human waste. "I'll leave you alone." Violet held Vivian's gaze for an instant. Vivian's cheek twitched; next instant her face was once again serene. She closed the door when she left and slowly, slowly Violet approached his bed.

People died in the winter, except Harry who couldn't endure another spring. Or did they die around the solstices? She made a quick mental survey of her deaths, and yes, yes they were always around the 20th of December, March, June...She could feel it now, as the winter solstice approached, the energy leaking out of the world, the universe even, feel the planet unable to carry its full load, spinning off the moribund to their deaths.

'Violet I love you and have loved you very much but I feel I can't go on...' It had been on a 20th of March she'd pasted Harry's good-bye note into her journal. The paper had browned around the clumsy, almost childish print.

Up close she heard Vince's soft moan, like an infant's coo. He faced away from her, toward the window with its blinds drawn against the morning light. His eyes were closed. A red poinsettia sat on the table by the window side of his bed. She studied his face, longer, impossibly thinner than the one she had last seen nearly six months ago.

"Hello sweetheart." She sat on Vivian's bedside chair, took his bony hand and sobbed. He barely stirred. His hand was cold. When he turned to face her, he opened his eyes and searched her face as if trying to place her. She saw the utter terror in his eyes and felt rage shudder through her, grip her throat and make it seize up.

"Vi, my love, doesn't look like we'll ever get married." He twisted his lips into a grimace she knew meant to be a smile. When she got to know him she discovered he wasn't humorless at all, only that Harry's big laughs had left no room. She laughed with him. "No need to get a sense of humor at this late date." She leaned to him and kissed him on the lips, on the cheeks, on the eyelids.

He tugged at her hand. "Lie down with me." She lay alongside him on the hospital bed. He smelled faintly of sweet pus and sour sweat. She nestled her head into his chest and propped his arm around herself and sobbed into his armpit. And what if Vivian, or Isa, or the nurse walked in?

"This stinks. I thought this time for sure I would go first. I'm sick of surviving and enduring, of knowing how to get up again the next day. Sick of it, Vince. Just fucking sick of it. How could you do this? How could you go and die on me like this? She felt his chest rising. He was trying to laugh.

Vivian sat at one end of the glass-topped dining table. Violet sat alongside her facing the wide picture window that gave onto rooftops and in between two tall buildings, a piece of river. They ate in silence the food Isa had brought them, food for anorexics in their early sixties: skinless chicken, steamed broccoli, red lettuce salad dressed with lemon juice and sprinkled with some herb, maybe rosemary. Last night Violet dreamed she was roasting a leg of pork and bright red sweet potatoes. In the dream she'd actually smelled the food. In waking life food didn't matter. She couldn't feel hunger.

She spoke to Vivian in her mind and imagined her lover's wife did the same. But their dialogue didn't spill over into their voices. Not yet. Isa served them honeydew for dessert. Had Vince told Vivian this was Vi's favorite fruit? She poured them decaffeinated cappuccino with nonfat milk. Violet sipped the hot milk. "Has he had a lot of pain?" Vivian glared up from her plate but didn't answer. Violet shook her head. "Of course he has." She felt herself begin to cry.

"I offered to have you, you know. He never asked." She stirred sweetener from a packet into her coffee. "All these years I'd known although he never said. I knew him so well it was hard for me to imagine that he could have room in his life for someone else. That there was another Vince with a whole other life."

"Did it ever threaten your life with your Vince?"

"At first. I was sick that first night my unconscious made me realize what it was he did when he was away. It was soon after Harry...after Harry. I'd dozed off watching some old movie. I always slept better when Vince was away, before you. I enjoyed a wholeness when he was gone, a sense of me. But in my dream I saw him making love to you. Standing. A goat like animal lovemaking like we never had together. I woke up with total intuition about everything. I vomited." She raised her eyes from her cup and looked straight on at Violet.
"I wanted him to leave you and marry me."
"Any woman would have thought she had to want that even if, like you, she really didn't."
"It didn't matter after a while."
"I said nothing when he got back. I raged inwardly thinking he was a hypocrite because there was no perceptible change. But then months went by and I saw that it was true. There was no change. What existed between him and you was separate, another reality. It had nothing to do with what existed between him and me. Sometimes I forgot all about it. Except every so often I remember hoping you would marry some other man. I'd remember that goat mating and know with you he was having the young man's passion he never had when he was young. It was as if in middle age he finally got rid of the embarrassment, the shyness that kept him from fucking like a goat when he was young and then he got lucky enough to find a grown woman who'd let him."
"Fucking like a goat." Violet laughed.
"That's the first time I say fuck out loud. How do you like that? Fuck. Fuck.Fuck.Fuck. I'm having breakfast with the woman my husband fucks like a goat."
"Did you hate me?"
"I did and I didn't."
"He never spoke about you. Sometimes we'd talk about what it would be like when we got married."
"If I had gone first."
"It used to be a sort of running game, a joke I started because it helped me to laugh at the two of you. And yet, the effort of setting up an entire life with somebody was more than I could begin to imagine after Harry. I had suitors. But I didn't want that. I didn't want another marriage."

The nurse announced herself with a cough. Vivian introduced her as Carol, from the outpatient hospice. "He's calling for you." She looked at both women. They filed ahead of Carol and entered the room, first Viv who took possession of the chair and clasped his hand, then Vi who knelt by the poinsettia. "He wants you to take his hand," Vivian whispered. Vi saw her eyes were closed. Vivian could cry without moving any muscles in her face. Her tears squirted from the shut eyes. Violet took his hand.
"You have both been good to me." He fell silent. "I wanted to be a good man." The women studied the near stillness of his chest. He was unconsciousness, but he was breathing.

Violet was halfway through crocheting a red square. She sat in the deep blue velvet armchair she imagined Vince sat in. Beside it on a small glass table his pipes hung from a rack, even the small white meerschaum relic from the 60s Vince used to smoke hash, the one he traveled with. Harry had given it to him in college. Vivian sat reading catalogues on the couch. Her knees touched the glass-topped coffee table with dark blue ceramic dolphins of many sizes.

"It helps me to observe Christmas. To shop like this. Gifts for Roy's children. They're Vince's grandchildren. You even gave him a child." She waved a catalogue from a City toy store.

"Roy and Rosemary didn't approve." Violet finished the red square and began to cast on another. "She had Roy tell me I was colluding in the oppression and the exploitation of another woman."

Vivian laughed. "The young people. They've reinvented Puritanism and don't know it. Roy knows you're here." Violet set down her needle and yarn. "I should call them. Do you want tea?"

This was the kitchen Vince cooked in. She put the stainless steel kettle on the steel restaurant stove. It was only when they cooked together that she longed for domesticity with him, a fleeting longing, like the longing for Harry to come back to life. There was always something one longed for.

Last night she had fallen asleep at last, knowing Vivian was sitting with Vince, with Vincent. Knowing she might not be with him when he died. Exhaustion swallowed her. She dreamed herself on a bed of snow fighting sleep, fighting the frozen sleep that took her. But it became an almost joyful dream. She'd opened a door in Vince's apartment of glass and stainless steel and found another hallway. Behind the doors that gave onto it Violet found a room filled with infants, on the floor, on an enormous diaper table, in playpens. Fat, happy infants. She found a room with rocking arm chairs by a bright red fire, empty, waiting for her. She found Harry and Vince together in another room, drinking yellow beer from bottles, just returned from sailing, telling light bulb jokes. When she woke up she'd forgotten where she was. For a few seconds in her half-sleep she'd been the college girl that Harry pursued and Vince pined for in silence, full of possibility, so happy. The girl who had remained immortal for so long.

The kettle whistled. Vivian, she'd learned, liked honey in her tea. Her lone indulgence. She spooned a heaping spoonful of honey for Viv. Her own tea she doctored with Vince's Wild Turkey, something else he traveled with. She set the mugs on the tray and felt the carpet swallow her footsteps. Vivian had stretched out on the couch and lay there, eyes closed. She pointed to the glass coffee table. "Set the tea right here."

Violet sipped the hot bourbon flavored tea. She fingered the red wool square and gazed at her own reflection in the glass window. It was a strong, well loved, brown face. She should call Roy, but it wasn't easy to leave the land of the dying once she'd entered it. A land so rarefied she and Vivian seemed to have only each other to share its peculiar air.

"I knew about you and Vincent because once he made a slip of the tongue. Amazing that he did it only once because our names are so similar, Vi, Viv. I knew he called you Vi the same way Harry did. He was helping me on with my stole. We were going to some benefit he didn't feel like going to and he'd forgotten his pipe. He sort of shoved the stole on my shoulders and ran back inside. We were by the elevator and he said, 'Hold on a minute, Vi, I've left my pipe behind.' I don't think he knew he said it. His back was to me. I don't think he noticed I sulked the whole night."

Violet took a long swallow of her tea. "Viv, Vi. I thought that similarity was very funny. I used to imagine running into you, or coming to see you, one of those movie wife and mistress scenes; a dramatic and cathartic and soapy moment that would have moved us all to the next thing. But I never did a thing. There was no next thing. Don't think I didn't think our scenario couldn't have unraveled many different ways. But there was a stillness at the core."

Vivian sat up. "But indecision is a way of deciding. It really is."

Violet put away her afghan squares. "I think I'll go call Roy."

"It's Mom. I'm here. With Vince."
"With Vince and Vivian, you mean."
"With Vince and Vivian."
"Some scene. Ro and I keep meaning to come see Vince. You know how it is. How's he doing?"
"He's still among the living. He wants to be seen."
"It's not so easy with the twins. Ro doesn't feel comfortable leaving them with sitters, you know how it is.'
"Then bring them."
"I'm not sure it's a scene for children."
"Children can handle the truth better than you think. Some children, that is."
"And some children handle more truth than they need." He coughed to interrupt himself. "Hey, Mom. It's rough for you, huh? Don't you want to get out, come down here, spend some time with the kids?"
"It's your place to come to me, Roy. I don't want to leave Vince."
"What have you gotten for all your devotion?"
She hung up. She waited by the telephone. She picked up on the first ring. "Ro and I and the boys will be there after dinner tomorrow. See you, OK? You know how it is. I'll call back again and tell Viv."
"I'll tell Viv."

Violet and Vivian crossed in the hallway. Vivian stood outside her bedroom door, a room Violet hadn't yet been in, the conjugal room. Or had they had separate bedrooms even before the hospital bed?
"Roy and Ro and the boys will be here tomorrow."
Vivian raised her eyebrows. "Tomorrow? To see Vincent?"
Their gazes held. They nodded. Both women doubted he would make it through the night.

Violet opened the shades to let the winter moonlight in. Vince stirred. In two days he'd grown thinner. His face was a skeleton now, his skin translucent. The look of complete terror would leave his face for long moments. It was gone now. She saw the slight tremor of his hand was a beckoning gesture and came closer. She could barely hear him ask for paper and pen. She found what he wanted in the drawer of the white lacquered night table. She raised the backrest of the bed, turned on the light and sat by him. From the corner of her eye she watched him labor to write. His will? A brief? A shopping list? A love poem? The effort exhausted him. He dropped the pen and slept again.

She heard the door push open and shoved paper and pen into the drawer.

Vivian approached the bed dressed in her pale blue robe, her long silver hair hung lose around her head.
"You look like an angel."
"An aged angel. Do you suppose angels age?"
They stood side by side smiling, watching Vince breathe.

"Vince wants everybody," Vivian said. She stood by the steps down to the living room and followed Rosemary's gaze to the boys. "He especially wants to see Hal and Vinnie, Ro. He's crazy about the twins. His beloved Thing One and Thing Two."

Violet had never seen Vivian beam. She knelt by the two boys. "Grandpa Vincent is very, very sick. You know that. He looks different. Like an old man in a fairy tale. But he's still your Grandpa Vince. Do you want to see him?"

Rosemary rushed to her children, knelt by them facing Vivian and put one arm around each boy. She looked at Roy. "You help me. It's not fair to ask five year olds to make a decision like this."

"Ro..."Roy spoke in a near whimper. "Everything, everything we have we owe to Vincent. We're teaching the boys fear."

The nurse entered and coughed. "He's calling you."

Vivian and Violet rose and followed the nurse into the Vince room. Roy took the boys by the h and and walked them in. Rosemary came in last. She held the door ajar with her body.
Vince was propped high on the hospital bed. His eyes were open. He looked better.
Hal, the plumper of the blonde twins, approached him with his arm outstretched. "I got a new transformer." He thrust the metal toy at Vince who dropped the toy on his lap. Vinnie followed his brother and climbed onto the bed. "Tell us a story. Can you tell us one?"
Vince tried to laugh. "Vi, find that pad, all right? Read it for me." She took the pad in the drawer and quickly read the clumsy print to herself.
"Vince?"
"Read it."
She glanced at Roy by the window, Vivian in her chair, the boys at either side of Vince on the bed, and Rosemary leaning against the door frame. She read:

I dreamed myself young. I was young once.
Harry and I are sailing.
So then it's true we never really die? I say to Harry. Here we both are. He laughed and I laughed with him. Harry could always make me laugh.
This was Harry's answer: For ourselves we never die. Death is for the living.
We had a good strong wind and a clear sky.
He said, 'I'm glad you took care of my wife.'
I told him, 'She took care of herself.'
And he said, 'So then it's true a man can love two women?'
Rosemary lunged into the room.
"Roy, stop your Mother. Stop, her stop her." She covered her ears with her hands.
Violet kept on reading. Vivian watched.
"A strong wind rose and I woke myself up before the storm. I shouldn't have woken up. I should have gone sailing. I was angry when I looked around and remembered where I was. I want to write down this dream. I want to write down this knowledge to leave it behind. I'm tired. I've forgotten."

"That's not a good kind of story, Grandpa." Hal jumped from the bed and ran to his mother. Vinie followed.

"Vi, maybe you'd better stop for now," Vivian said.

"For Christ's sake," Roy bellowed. "What is this, psychodrama time? My father was a murderer, a self murderer but still a murderer. My Mother was used.."

"Shut up, "Vince bellowed.

"You're going to kill him," Violet screamed.
"Read on," Vince could barely speak.

"Do we have to accept this tyranny just because he's a dying man?" Ro said to Roy. He put his arm around his wife. They leaned together into the doorframe.

"The important thing is to make room for it all," Violet read on. "The important thing is to find the way not to avoid, not to close off. Intelligence is the true organ of love.."

She stopped. "That's it Vince, that's as far as you got."

"What about the sailing Grandpa? That's the good part." Hal came close to the foot of the bed.

"Yes, tell us a Grandpa Harry sailing story. Tell us about Grandpa Harry sailing the Milky Way." Vinnie joined his brother. Hal climbed back onto the bed and Vinnie followed. "Tell us the one with Grandpa Harry sailing to the land of the egg people, or to the land of the tricky grown-ups, or the land of the dinosaurs..."

"Give me a message for Grandpa Harry. I'm going sailing with him soon." Vince struggled to get one arm around each boy.

"Ask him what really happened to the dinosaurs." Vinnie nestled into Vince.

Vivian and Violet looked at each other, then at Vince.

"He's tired now." Viv gently eased the two boys down. She picked up Hal. Vi picked up Vinnie.

"Kiss your Grandpa,' Viv said. Each woman held one child on either side of the dying man. They kissed him.

"How could they do this?" Rosemary screamed at Roy. The two stood in the living room by the enormous window. Isa had set a tray with tea and cookies on the coffee table alongside the ceramic dolphins. Hal and Vinnie sat on the floor on opposite sides of the table eating the cookies in silence.

"Get a hold of yourself, Ro. You're scaring the boys."

Vivian had returned to the Vince room to settle him into aloneness.

Violet crocheted a new red square.

"How could you let her read that terrible thing in front of the boys. How could she read it?"

Roy stepped back. "She's right over there. Why don't you ask her yourself? The boys heard their own tale, Ro. Their story about sailing." He spun around to face his Mother.

"What did you think you were doing, Violet?"

"Doing what Vince asked me to do."

"You mean what you're always doing."

She threw the crocheted square onto the carpet. "Drop it. Let it go now, Roy. You've got to let it go. you don't have to be so angry. You don't have to judge my life. It's mine. Even my mistakes are mine. You can choose to let it go."
Violet drew a square in the air with her hands. "You're a prisoner of your own small thinking. You avoid, just as Vince said. You didn't kill Harry. You're not responsible for his or my choices."
She drew him toward her. "Step out of it. Break away. You can choose to."
Ro tugged Roy back toward herself. "You want his approval? You people use each other to escape from your problems, to not confront them. You're advising him to get another woman on the side?" Ro was screaming. "Men have gotten away with this for centuries. Mistresses should have gone out when women's suffrage came in. We won't stop being oppressed by men until we stop colluding with their oppression."

Vivian stepped down into the living room and threw herself on the couch.

"Don't be a fool, Rosemary. There's a lot of room between one truth and the next and thank God for that. Vincent is sleeping."

She looked at Hal and Vinnie and the empty cookie plate. "Hey, Thing One and Thing Two, shall we read the Cat in the Hat?"

The boys rushed onto her lap.

"Why should one man have two such women?" Roy drew Ro to him and let her sob against his chest.

Vivian shut the door behind Roy, Ro and the twins. She leaned against it. She pounded on it with her fist.

"Get out of my sight." She looked away from Violet who stood beside her, watching. "I don't want to see you. What are you doing here? Who do you think you re."

She ran into the living room. She grabbed one of the ceramic dolphins from the coffee table and threw it against the wall. She threw another and another until they had all been smashed, making a rain of glistening dark blue slivers on the carpet.

"You wanted to take my husband because yours was fool enough to blow out his brains. You fucked, fucked, fucked up your own life and wanted to steal mine. I hated you. I wished you would blow your brains out. I imagined you smashing your car in a snowdrift. I imagined you lost in the woods, freezing to death. I wished you wasting away from some terrible sickness."

Violet lunged at Vivian and slapped her hard across the face. "If you had any guts at all you would have left a man who loved another woman better. Who thought of another woman when he close his eyes beside you at night. Who didn't desire you."

"There's more to a marriage than desire. Desire has nothing to do with it."

Vivian lifted her hand, her fingers crisped into claws, her red nails shining. Violet stopped her before the claws reached her face. She pulled with both her hands on Vivian's hair. Vivian pushed Violet's shoulders. She fell, dragging Vivian down. They rolled, shoved, pushed, pulled, bit, screamed, until they were spent and lay panting beside each other.

"What did you want with him. You had a life. You had your teaching, your political work. You had your child. I had nothing. My work was to be Vincent's wife. I would imagine you arriving to teach your English classes smelling of Vincent's sperm. O that terrible, goat fucking.

"I heard him slip into his study one night when he thought I was sleeping, to call you. I lifted the receiver in the bedroom.

"He was saying, 'I want you Vi. I want you. It fills me to think of you. It was an emptiness I didn't now I had. I want you.

"And you said to him, 'Undo your belt, zip down your pants, those warm fingers are my fingers, I stroke you now, so softly you think its sea breeze. We're sailing, lying naked under a blue sky. There are no clouds, only hot breeze from my hand. I kiss your cock. I slip my tongue around it. You think it's the sun. You think it's the beginning of time. You think it's the big bang.
"Phone sex by an English teacher. I could hear him moaning, moaning, almost singing, moaning and laughing at the same time."

They held each other and lay in silence on the carpet.

Vivian sat up. "O my God. We've left him a long time."

They rushed into the Vince Room. He was lying very still in the gray glow of the moonlight. They studied him, then looked at each other. Vincent breathed. Violet pulled a chair along the window side of the bed. Each woman sat beside him and took his hand.

"Sometimes I wish you would go and be done with your misery." Vivian bent down to kiss his hand.

Violet nodded. "I always imagined you and I alone at last when we were old. Funny the illusions I used to second guess the present."

He opened his eyes. He looked at Vivian. He looked at Violet. He looked straight ahead.

"And now from nowhere, there's wind." He sounded surprised. He didn't breathe again.

Violet awoke abruptly inside the blue dimness to the halting sound of her own shallow breathing. She swallowed and tasted bile in her mouth's dryness. "Now we are both widows." She curled up under the quilt. "Please God, deliver me to the next passage." She pictured herself drowning inside this lock of the canal, eyes fixed on the next rise.

There was a barely audible knock on the door. "I'm up," she called out. "Vivian came in with coffee on a tray. She was fully dressed in a navy blue suit, her gray hair pulled back and coiled on her neck, her face set into the serene rictus, and made up.

Vivian sat by the desk to watch Violet shed her flannel nightgown and step into the bathroom. She emerged naked and wet and with Vivian watching, covered her tall, lean body with Vivian's panties, stockings, bra, slip and dark gray dress. "Thank god for Vincent's instructions." Vivian said. Vi nodded. "Just as well he wanted no wake, no funeral." She smoothed back her hair. "We've been having his wake for weeks now. We can have a memorial for his friends but later, later."

"Only one more passage." Violet stepped out of the room and Vivian rose and followed her.

Vivian, Violet, Roy and Ro stood on the deck of the Pal Harry, Vincent's sail boat. The water was flat and gray beneath the shell pink gray sky. The boat rose and sunk lightly, like breath. Roy eased the boat into the slight breeze. They sailed. Vivian took a handful of the ashes and set it loose into the breeze. Violet clutched the ashes in a fist. She opened her fist upon the water.

Boxes stood lined up on both sides of Vivian and Vince's king-sized bed. Viv removed the last suit from its hanger and handed it to Vi who folded it carefully and rested it on the pile of suits inside one of the boxes. The radio was tuned onto the all news station, very low. They barely spoke.

Vivian moved to Vince's white lacquered dresser, opened the middle drawer and handed Violet a stack of shirts. Violet filled boxes with shirts, underwear, silk ties. They filled two boxes with Vince's huge Italian slip on shoes, his low boots.

"...at the tone 3:15, came from the radio.

"I want this finished before Roy comes at four to take you to the station. Before the truck from Goodwill comes at 4:30," Vivian said.

They went swiftly, without looking into the high shelves of Vince's closet. Viv handed Vi his sweaters. "Maybe Roy wants them." Vivian set aside for Roy on the bed dress cardigans, pullovers, and bulky outdoor sweaters.

Violet glanced at the books. Vivian shook her head. "Unless you want any." She left untouched the row of books on his night table. "He wasn't done reading them, thinking with them. It's like throwing away his mind."

They sat on either side of the bed. Vivian opened Vince's tooled leather jewelry box, closed it. She sobbed soundlessly, tears squirting out of her eyes. She opened the box again, reached into it then held her hand in a fist out to Vi. "Take this." Violet reached her hand and Vivian opened her fist. She dropped onto VI's palm a glistening yellow orb with a bright blue stone that matched exactly one she had at home. Violet studied it for some seconds before understanding. "Vince's college ring exactly like Harry's."

The women smiled and held each other's gaze.
"Where does the self go?" Vi whispered. Vivian looked away.

They could hear Roy's footsteps approaching, muffled by the carpet.

Fish in the Water

Rodolfo trimmed his black mustache with the small scissors he kept on top of the medicine cabinet where the kids couldn't grab them, his usual ritual before a big speech. Tiny black hairs rained on the crud Magdalena had let accumulate on the green sink. Rodolfo let them rain.

An image flashed through his mind, fleeting: the beach at night, shark teeth shining in the moonlight, burrowing in the sand. The long black sharks vibrated in the electric breeze of secret currents. He reached for the radio that hung on the peeling frame of the bathroom window. He turned up the sound.

"The Island Liberation Army occupied the approach to the town of Los Naguales on the border with Ventura, according to the ILAs City Branch. Los Naguales' copper mines have been hotly contested by Official Forces and the ILA."

He brought his round face closer to the mirror and went on cutting.

"President Buffen denied rumors that additional official troops have been deployed to the border."

Rodolfo pictured a Rebel in fatigues crouched in ochre mud.

'Real revolutionaries,' he thought in the Rebel's voice. He felt the Boy's open-mouthed longing. He sucked the burning smoke of the cigarette he had propped on the edge of the sink dropping ashes into the bowl. In the Seducer's voice he thought of Iris's firm thighs, her tight skin, her sharp sweat. 'How to get her to shower before fucking?' The Seducer didn't like remembering Iris was off limits for the moment. The Leadership Commission had no authority over his personal life. How could Marieta throw socialist morals in his face at their last meeting. She'd pointed at him with her red nailed index finger. 'Cut out the philandering. It is unseemly for a leader of your stature. You have to model the New Man.'

The Leader's voice interrupted. 'The implication is that Iris resigned as a reporter and photographer for REDENCION because of the love affair.' Marieta's audacity! 'REDENCION needs a reporter more than the comrade needs a mistress.' He turned down the news of fires and hold-ups. He stretched his upper lip over the tiny, cigarette yellowed teeth, tilted his head back, clipped the last hair. He studied the line of his mustache. 'Fine', thought the Seducer. Rodolfo combed his black curls with his pick. He placed the cigarette between his thick lips, sucked hard, and smiled at himself in the mirror as he threw the butt into the toilet.

The Leader thought, 'In tonight's speech hammer away at the victories, the most important thing is to challenge defeatism, and then agitate on holding the closing of the Congress of the City Branch in the Island's Liberated zone. What a victory that will be! 'Whatever you do, don't dwell on the bombing of the Branch office. Don't give the Venturan exile scums the satisfaction. Winning the battle for the mind was as important as winning the battle over Naguales.'

He opened the bathroom door onto Magdalena's screams. "Don't turn on the TV until you're done eating." In Father voice he thought, 'She scolds the children too much.' The Husband thought, 'She's not well.' The Rebel scolded, 'It's your fault. Your machismo is responsible.' He stood in the doorway, his fists clenched, his gaze on the bookshelf made of planks held up by bricks, sagging with the weight of offset pamphlets, dog-eared books by Marx, Engels,Lenin and Clauvell, stacks of yellowed REDENCION, the black headlines of the issue on top blaring:

ILA ADVANCING
MEDICINE IN THE LIBERATED ZONE
ILA DEMANDS BUFFEN DECLARE POLITICAL AMNESTY

He studied Magdalena's silhouette framed by the doorway from the hall into the living room, and again by the doorway from the living room to the kitchen. He took a sharp breath and lit a cigarette. 'Her thighs are bursting her blue jeans,' thought the Seducer, 'She's not the slender Barrio Princess you stole.' His mind flashed an image of shark teeth, torn skin. He smoothed the pleats of the white linen guayabera Magdalena stayed up late to iron last night.

From beyond the kitchen doorway she fixed on him the unseeing gaze of her slanted eyes. He approached her. The kids screamed from the living room. He stepped aside to let her run to their screams and reached for the plate of rice and beans on the kitchen counter. He tossed his cigarette into the sink filled with pots and dishes, tore off a piece of the bread from the long thin loaf propped on a basket filled with yellow onions and green peppers.

Plate in hand he dove into the uproar in the living room. Roddy and Matty jumped up from where they lay on the floor fighting over the TV and grabbed his legs. Screaming, Papi, Papi, Papi Roddy reached him first.

"Sit down and let your Father eat." Magdalena knelt beside the TV with her hand on the switch. "Don't turn it off." Roddy clutched his Father's leg harder. But she did, and there was a moment of absolute silence. Then Roddy ran to the TV and turned it back on.

Rodolfo ate standing, staring at the screen. Beach, giant wave, slender surfer holding a can of soda. "That's what the Island's good for." Magdalena glanced at the screen. "They sell a lot of soda." He looked straight at his wife and tried to catch her gaze. "Remember the time you nearly drowned?" She fixed her blank eyes on his. "Remember Mama. on the Island. After we got caught in that big rainstorm. We were sleeping on the beach and we ran into that fish food restaurant. It was closed so we slept on the tables wrapped in dirty tablecloths."

He sat at the table and pushed aside the latest REDENCION to make room for his plate. ILA DENOUNCES BOMBING OF CITY BRANCH OFFICE. 'Ten days after the bombing the photo still makes you shake with terror.' The Rebel was always scolding. 'The last photograph Iris took for REDENCION before she resigned had been one of her best,' thought the Leader. 'And what a fucking bad time for this bomb. In the speech tonight make sure people come out agitated to go to the Congress and not shitting in their pants.'

Magdalena sat down on the arm of the sofa. "I remember the rainstorm." Their gazes held for an instant. The same memory filled them of love with laughter, in the rain, like fish in the water. 'We were so new then,' thought Rodolfo at once Rebel, Leader and Seducer. Had he forgotten how to hope? Magdalena rose to pry Roddy's hand from the TV controls. "It's Maddy's turn to pick the show." He frowned as his sister changed from cops and robbers to a cartoon about a dog. She steered Roddy to the sofa, sat him down and kissed his nose.

"The morning after the rainstorm you went into the water. It was a mirror. No waves." Rodolfo set down his fork. "We were Islanders from the City. We didn't know about undertows. I was watching you from the shore. You were screaming and a fisher man walking by on the shore was calling out to you to swim in a diagonal. I thought you were fooling around, until the fisherman walked into the water to pull you in." He saw the children had stopped watching TV to hear the story. Magdalena smiled. "You hypnotize them like you hypnotize the audiences at your speeches."

'She used to say your voice had charisma,' thought the Seducer. 'She called it fresh ground coffee voice.' The Rebel again passed judgment. 'That was when you were still lovers and Magdalena cared even more about dreams of revolution than you did.'

She reached over and broke off a piece of his bread. "I can't remember nearly drowning on our honeymoon." He finished chewing a mouthful of rice and beans. "That was our honeymoon?" She nodded. "That's the only time we've gone to the Island together." Roddy tossed a sneaker at Maddy. It flew over the table, over Rodolfo's food. The children screamed. Magdalena rose and grabbed for the collar of Roddy's t-shirt. She knelt to spank him.

Rodolfo rose. "How could you forget you nearly drowned?" He looked at his face in the mirror of the china cabinet, reflected among the clutter of dishes. He arranged his curls. He walked out the front door throwing kisses.

"The same way you forgot our honeymoon." Magdalena spoke to his back as it disappeared into the darkness of the hallway. "Don't you have time for your coffee?" But Rodolfo had vanished at a run down the stairs. She stood by his plate and finished the rice, the beans, the bread.

Across from the Venice Rodolfo stopped to study the row of identical eight story buildings all named after cities in Italy. "Magdalena's damn nagging to move to the Venice and for what? " The Leader strode away. 'Better for the kids? The same junkies were everywhere. At least before we lived right by the Branch office.' The Seducer interrupted. "The way things are going it's to your advantage. Will Iris turn up tonight? Has she come to any functions since she resigned?' He nodded a greeting to Lalo, a middle aged Islander who caressed his car with one chamois wrapped hand, held a beer can with the other. 'A true revolutionary moves among the masses like a fish in the water was one of Marieta's favorite precepts from Mao. Did he really even like the masses? What could be less interesting than making love to your car on the street?' The Leader despaired.

He walked quickly past Papo, Victor and Chino. 'Damn tecatos.' Thought the Rebel. 'When would the time come to send junkies and drug dealers to the firing squad like they did in Cuba, and later in Ventura after their Revolutions?' As usual they listened to their boom box and waited to make sales. No matter how hard Magdalena tried to run away from them they turned up, colonizing like the Empire, like roaches.' He ignored their calls of "Hola, mi Pana." Victor called after him, "Not selling newspapers today?"

He rushed to the corner where the calm of the street gave way to the agitation of stores and fruit stands of the avenue. 'You'll kill them if they ever come near your kids,' the Rebel decreed. 'Lumpen. Marxism had named them well. When he left the street to become a Pentecostal preacher he'd hated having to forgive them. This was how Marxism had surpassed Christianity. There was no need to turn the other cheek. Che had said a revolutionary loves. I say a revolutionary hates.'

He ran down the subway stairs. His heels echoed in the piss stinking tunnel. He ran for the train, sank into the cold steel seat. He traveled against the evening home going traffic in an empty car.

He closed his eyes on the graffiti of Papo and Flaco. Someone had scrawled VIVA A FREE SOCIALIST ISLAND over COMMUNISTS OUT OF VENTURA. One small victory in the ideological war. He breathed deeply and went over his speech the way Reverendo Isaac had taught him to do with his sermons.

The columns that framed the porch of his Grandfather's house on the Island: summary of recent victories on the Border. The stairs of cracked Moorish tiles: the first Congress of the City Branch ever to be held in the Free Zone. The dark hallway hung with family portraits: summary of the current military situation. Abuela's room: summary of the political situation. The goatyard: links between the struggle on the Island and the fight for democratic rights in the City, housing, schooling; don't forget arson at the Naples.

The Boy dreams himself in a crowd of men dressed in fatigues and camouflage. The crowd is dense. He hears a percussion of clocks, congas, heartbeats, shots and hell shrieks. The boy seeks the good man with Rodolfo's face. He opens a door. Runs after him. He looks for the face. Runs after him. He looks for the face in mirrors. He woke up at his stop and ran out before the train doors closed.

He'd timed his arrival well. He could see across the street from the train exit the crowd already gathered outside the public school Marieta had rented for the rally. By the newsstand Rodolfo sighted her, with Celso and Domingo, huddled on the steps of the school in their continuous informal meeting of the Leadership Commission. 'This is the best of the cheap meeting places.' The Leader had to admit there was no way of ever getting rid of that pain in the ass Marieta in the face of such efficiency. 'With my speeches and her administrative gift the organization will go far.' He studied the headlines of the commercial press. Without looking he saw the row of vaginas like hairy flowers on the covers of magazines. 'Ay Iris.' The Seducer was silenced by the Rebel. 'Just get over that sexual addiction.'

The Leader found the headlines he sought. GOVERNOR DENIES ILA OCCUPATION OF NAGUALES. CADETES DEL RETORNO TAKE CREDIT FOR BOMBING.

He approached the crowd studying the face. 'Knowing the individual is not the same as knowing the group.' Reverendo Isaac had often said this but he'd only begun to understand. 'The group is a different animal, a prehistoric one,' thought the Seducer. He remembered how Reverendo Isaac moved his congregations to tears and howling and drew from them those senseless syllables, that speaking in tongues he claimed was the Holy Spirit but Rodolfo later discovered was simply power. 'It's your job to move that power,' thought the Leader.

He dove into the human labyrinth that now spilled into the street. 'It is possible to move all these people to act in concert.' the Leader went on. 'What if you fail? What if you don't measure up to the task?' The Rebel was afraid. A young man with a long, sharp face, one of the security guys who would attach himself to Rodolfo like a leech, lit his cigarette. He smiled and shook hands. The Rebel went on with his judgments. 'Some speakers like Secretary General Echegaray don't need tricks. Even Reverendo Isaac. But you are a cracked bell.'

The Boy's images of black cassocks dragging mud and reeking sweat flooded Rodolfo. Night; fire; sweet smoke; sweet cloying flesh. The Boy dreamed himself but was he cannibal or missionary? Three young women militants Rodolfo didn't yet know sold REDENCION on the edge of the crowd not far from where Celso, Marieta and Domingo stood talking. 'The land of the blind where you are the one-eyed man,' thought the Rebel. 'No one is a prophet in his own land,' thought the Leader.

"Working hard?" He addressed the prettiest of the three REDENCION sellers. He spoke with the fresh ground coffee voice of the Seducer. "It's not the speeches that make revolutions," he said. ('And you are only good for speeches,' the Rebel scolded.') "Selling REDENCION does, daily, painstaking work does." The dark one parted her slender lips and smiled to show small white teeth and the pink tip of her tongue. "Companero, isn't it dangerous to hold the closing of our Congress in the Free Zone?" He saw Marieta signaling to him from the stairs. 'Here comes another scolding.' The Seducer smiled at the girl. "When there is war, there is always danger," he said as he turned to walk to where the others from the Leadership Commission stood watching him. "We can't make decisions based on fear. Only on strategy." With that he broke his gaze from the young woman's and bounded up the steps.

"Magdalena home with the kids?" Celso said and patted him on the back. Marieta nodded. "We've got child care here. She could have come." She brought her head close to his and talked into his ear as they walked up the steps. "The mobilization lists for the Congress don't look good." He saw the dark shadows under her big eyes. She was probably up all night supervising the printing of the program and the banner painting for this rally. "The mobilization tonight is weak. It's obvious the local committees haven't been meeting their quotas of home visits. We've underestimated the impact of the bombing of our offices. I'm calling an extraordinary session of the Commission after the rally. Don't make faces. There's no choice."

She read from the tiny notebook where she listed her tasks and everyone else's. "In the speech tonight you have to bring up the dues. If tonight's fund pitch is no good we're not going to cover the office rent, let alone the repairs from the bombing." He nodded. Security had opened the doors and they joined the line of people entering the school hallway, slowed at the door by the meticulous search of purses, knapsacks and briefcases.

Stuck at the door the crowd milled. Rodolfo greeted militants and sympathizers as if he blessed them, mimicking Reverendo Isaac. After most seats of the auditorium were filled the Leadership Commission walked inside followed by its security team. They marched together down the aisle of the dusty school auditorium nodding at the crowd and smiling. For Violetof the Island Solidarity Organization he had a long gaze to the eyes. She was sunk into the wooden chair and her knees were pressed onto the seat in front of her. Her yellow eyes returned his signal. 'Beneath that designer denim dress she is completely naked,' thought the Seducer. He walked on. Marieta was watching.

The leaders climbed onto the illuminated stage lined with luminous banner of red and green satin.
ALL OUT TO THE CONGRESS
INDEPENDENCE NOW
THE FUTURE IS NOW

The men sat at the green and red satin covered table. Marieta poured glasses of water. Through his cigarette smoke Rodolfo saw a sparse audience, at least a third of the auditorium empty. Militants on security duty wearing red and green armbands were lined up along the walls of the room. Only Iris and her camera were missing. The murmur of voices rose and fell like breath.

Marieta stood behind the podium covered in red and green, coughed, and sipped water. She laughed softly and the crowd laughed with her. 'It's amazing how she reaches them, 'The Rebel thought. 'Fish in the water. Feet on the ground.'

"Hot in here, isn't it?" She laughed and they laughed with her. "A small sacrifice for the struggle. Others sacrifice more." Her voice dropped and resounded, her face glowed: Marieta possessed by her mission. "The successful culmination of our Congress campaign is no more and no less than building our revolution as the Island Liberation Army makes our revolution, as we make our revolution day by day wherever we are, we are the heroic Island people who have survived and triumphed in the face of centuries of colonialism..."

As she spoke the Leader traversed the porch columns of his Grandfather's house, the stairs with the cracked Moorish tiles, the hallway with the dark portraits, the rooms, the goatyard...

She enumerated the least and the greatest colonial abuses. Rodolfo saw the faces of the audience reflecting the luminous expression of Marieta's firm, serious face. He allowed himself to be raised by anger; anger against the empire; redeeming anger. After all, Reverendo Isaac's devil had turned out to be a bunch of rich people with an army. Anger and his mission redeemed him of the discordant multitude of his voices, of his indifference, of his adulteries. For that moment he knew that he was good.

They were still chanting INDEPENDENCE NOW when Rodolfo reached the podium. He adjusted the microphone and saw through the glare of the lights the glowing faces of the audience. He had not finished saying, "Companeros," when the bomb went off. The sound of the bomb reached him after the screams that came from every corner of the room. He heard wood creak, metal crash and smelled a sharp, acrid scent.

"I shit on the mothers of the Cadetes del Retorno and all Venturan exiles, doing the Empire's work for them." He heard his voice blare over the speakers, the sound system still intact. He felt himself taken by the hand; found himself in a car. Violet's familiar bony hand offered him a lit cigarette. 'Survival above socialist morals.' The Rebel approved. Celso himself had shoved him into Violet's green Volkswagen.

"Leave Rodolfo," Iris said. She took a deep drink from the beer can she had resting on the stoop of the Venice. She put her arm around Magdalena who sat beside her with her eyes fixed on Roddy and Maddy. Iris released Magdalena and focused her camera on the children's race upstreet.

"Women's liberation won't keep me company when it's three in the morning and I'm all alone in bed," Magdalena said. She sipped beer from the glass she'd brought downstairs.

"You're alone at night anyway." Iris set the camera on her lap.

Roddy screamed. He'd fallen forward on his face. Magdalena ran to pick him up and hold him until he was done crying. Iris followed, focused, shot the squatting Mother, the crying boy.

Back on the stoop of the Venice they drank and smoked in silence in the muggy early summer night.

"Soon it'll be time to wrestle the kids into bed." Magdalena looked up. "I'm sick of the sky that never turns dark." Iris took her hand. "In the Island the night sky is black." Magdalena turned to face her friend. "I keep dreaming of sharks. I dream they chase me. I go into a sea without waves and suddenly night falls and the sharks in the black waters rub against me, cold and rough. I dream I know if I swim in a diagonal I will be saved, but I can't"

Iris opened another beer can. Magdalena drained he glass. Roddy appeared with his pants torn at the knee, his knee, bleeding, screeching.

Magdalena pulled at her long black curls. "Give me a break."

Iris picked up Roddy. "Sana, sana, culito de rana," she sing-songed. "Now your Titi Iris will take you to bed." She sat Roddy on her hip, took Matty by the hand and walked the children upstairs.

Alone on the stoop Magdalena felt a chill, hunger. She drank. she smoked cigarettes one after another. At last Iris' military heels clicked liberation.

"They're both asleep. They were wiped out from all the running."

Magdalena rested her head on Iris' shoulder. "Last night I dreamed the sharks chased me as far as the shore." Iris stroked he hair. "You won't believe this but the sharks started giving me those licking kisses dogs give."

"While I was singing, 'duermete mi nino' I got a revelation." Iris took Magdalena's hands. Her slanting eyes everyone said resembled Magdalena's, shone; she fought laughter. "I thought, let's go to the Island right now. If we hurry we can catch the rooster flight." Magdalena jumped up. "You can't be serious." She strode indoors. "You are serious. But where would we stay? What money would we use?"

"How many times haven't you spent the rent money on one of Rodolfo's organizing trips? Let's do it. You're eaten up by rage. One of these days the kids are going to pay."

"Where have you seen a woman who wasn't bursting with rage?"

They walked arm in arm up the hallway labyrinth, laughing.

"To hell with the cigarette buts in the sink." Magdalena threw two pots on top of the dishes and pots already spilling onto the counter. She pushed past the forever open ironing board in the hallway by the bathroom door. "To hell with the white guayaberas." She kicked open the bathroom door. "To hell with the mustache trimmings in the sink." She grabbed an armful of clean laundry hanging on the wooden drier above the bathtub. Iris climbed on a chair to reach on the high closet shelf for the suitcase Rodolfo used on his political trips. Magdalena tossed the clean laundry into the suitcase.

"I see convenience prevails over socialist morality." Violet sank deep into the carved foam rubber chair covered in a velvety corduroy the color of blood. Her knees were folded and her dusty bare feet were planted on the chair. 'Not even the children would do that at your house.' The Leader made Rodolfo squirm and sip cognac faster than he wanted to. From where he sat in an identical chair facing Violet he could see her thin soft thighs and the darkness of the curly hairs in her center so unlike the lighter curls on her head. He had been sitting in the enveloping chair for an hour engulfed by a light summer blanket Violet had wrapped around him. 'As if you were in shock,' thought the Rebel. He sipped cognac and let her light another cigarette for him. Flutes and violins from the disc of nueva cancion music from the Island she was playing for him put him in mind of rainstorms.

And now she rose, played a disc of boleros by Maya, the Island suicide with the hoarse voice, and sank beside Rodolfo into the foam chair. He kissed her hard, quickly. Fish without air. He made galloping, deep thrusting, biting love to her.

They'd made love many times but he had never before seen her smooth skin of a nearly blue whiteness. The blue skin glowed against the red brown of her hair. Nor had he ever noticed the unexpected roundness of her shoulders, the clarity of her yellow eyes, the softness of her lips and that her tongue was sweet, as if it were emanating nectar not spit. He closed his eyes and saw waves sparkle, then the mirror sea, then the adolescent thighs of Magdalena rising in and out of the flat water guided by the fisherman who kept her from drowning. Maya's hoarse, breaking, smoky voice engulfed him.

The Boy dreams black night. Thick adobe walls. Smells wet ground. Salamanders scurry between his toes. He dreams himself a Taino youth. His manhood is being tested. With the others he climbs the cemetery wall. Together, they must bury the war dead. This work is only for virgins. The touch of a youth who's not a virgin will make the dead warriors bleed into the mud.

The elders watching don't say so, but it is known because the dream has a past and a memory, that this work will make men of the virgins.

After the burial, at dawn ( the dream has a future) the elders will take the new men to the women.

They will be warriors.

The Boy dreams he is impure, no virgin. He slides down the wall to the wet ground. He hears the rapid drumming of his terror. To touch the bodies and make them bleed is to reveal to all that he is already not a child. Not to touch the bodies, to run, means he will never be a man. He tears himself from the dream. No longer a child. Never a man.

As usual, Violet dropped him off in her green bug a few blocks from the Venice. He walked slowly up his block naked of humans, populated only by garbage cans spewing beer bottles, paper diapers, bits of cigarette pack cellophane.

He climbed the Venice stairs. An image filled him: Magdalena's taffy skin as she loved him inside wet clothes on the restaurant table after the big rain. 'It rained and rained and we were fish.' The rebel felt the image cleansing him. He saw the glistening shark teeth, felt the coarse shark skin. He felt a hot pain on his chest and on his thigh. Only now as he approached Magdalena did he begin to feel the blows from the bombing. Moaning, holding onto the greasy hallway wall, he dragged himself the last steps to his door.

"Ay Mama, ay Mama." He struggled with the key and at last pushed open the door. "Ay Mama, they got me this time. This time they really got me." He dove into the chloacal smell of diapers, cooked beans, coffee grounds. He reached his bedroom door and leaned into the frame.

Empty bed. Empty crib. Empty cot.

He lit a cigarette and filled his lungs.

"This can't surprise you." He welcomed the Rebel's judgment. He found her note stuck to the refrigerator door by a magnet shaped like a dolphin.

I can't take it. I've gone to the Island with Iris. I've taken the rent money. I'll write. Forgive me.

'She's signed with the same M in a circle she puts on notes telling you where she's left your dinner.' If he could the Rebel would smack him against the wall. Rodolfo pounded his head with his fists. With one swipe of his arm he crashed the clutter on the counter to the floor. He took a deep swallow of rum from the bottle Magdalena kept for him on the refrigerator, sucked the last of the cigarette, tossed the butt into the sink, dragged himself back to the bedroom, and threw himself on the bed.

He dropped his head into the pillow that smelled of jasmine and sharp sweat, like Magdalena, and sank into a dead man's sleep.

The Boy dreams himself a rodent amid the rotting beams and dusty gray plaster that he gnaws at, that cover him in the dust they shed as he gnaws. He dreams himself all alone. When they leave it always hurts; it hurts each time; and they are always leaving. He dreams himself in his grandmother's kitchen where the vapors of pine oil, coffee, scorched milk and beans have woven into the fibers of the sooty curtains that swing, swing, swing on the breeze of lead and petroleum and the distant vibrations of cars and trains.

He dreams himself seated at the table of wood brown formica writing in the black marble notebook.

The TV is on loud: cowboys and Indians shooting.

A light bulb hangs over the table from the ceiling and casts a yellow-red ring.

Out of the corner of his eye the Boy looks at the Christ on the wall. Is the red heart pulsing, beating, spitting blood?

He turns the TV sound louder and the sounds of the mice race, of their gnawing, are gone. The walls expand and shrink with the breath of their creatures.

Bang, bang, shots, blows, kicks, take that, take that. He likes this. Take more.

In the notebook he adds the numbers in the row that slants. The big numbers get smaller toward the edges of the page; he erases and erases. The page is torn.

The Boy climbs on the chair, reaches for the box on top of the refrigerator, bites at the donuts covered in sugar crystals one after another. He gnaws at the sugar crystals stuck to the cardboard box.

He returns to the table and fixes his gaze on the screen. He dives inside it. Into the glowing green, the luminous gases, the wings of fern, the fog, the shrieking of the apes. His hands are roots.

The telephone woke him. The morning sunlight filtered thorough the slit between the shade and the window frame.

"She's dead." Celso's piercing voice, sharper than usual, made Rodolfo sit upright on the bed. He saw Magdalena floating face down on the mirror sea. 'You killed her." The Rebel would kill Rodolfo if he could. 'The Devil doesn't play games. Reverendo Isaac's voice promised compassion, but not yet. 'The Devil's price is high.'

Celso was sobbing. "Marieta's wounds weren't serious enough to kill her." He couldn't go on.

"Marieta?" Rodolfo's voice couldn't disguise his relief.

"They let her bleed to death in the emergency room. They killed her twice. We can't let them get away with this. You've got to get over here." Celso slammed the phone.

Rodolfo didn't waste time with a shower. He changed into the last clean shirt on the ironing board; brushed his teeth; smoothed his pants.

He grabbed the papers at the corner newsstand.
EXPLOSION BREAKS UP ILA RALLY
CADETES CLAIM RESPONSIBILITY

He read as he walked. He raced into the train. As he read on, the Leader ordered the agenda of the Leadership Commission meeting. With a tremor of excitement the Leader formulated his proposal. 'We will dedicate the Congress to Marieta, now that she's a martyr.'

The Woman Who Married Her Own Son

Magdalena biked almost to the end of her graveled street to spy on the sunset pink house of The Woman. She looked through the wrought iron bars and the jungle of vines around the porch. She wished her own house was sunset pink, although hers was magenta and that was next best. She studied this house to see what gave it a separate sense. She and the little girls called it the house of The Woman who Married Her own Son.

"In the Reparto Playa Nueva all the houses are the same except for the color and the secrets". Her dog Lasi looked at her with yellow eyes, and smiled her dog smile. Magdalena smiled back and when Lasi jumped up she kissed her back. Lasi, with the face of a shepherd and a collie's white chest, fluffy tail and floppy ears, was the best surprise Papi ever brought back from a preaching trip. He couldn't wait to wake her up when he got home in the middle of the night from an evangelism campaign in The Interior. He handed her the tiny zippered bag. In the darkness she'd smelled the salty puppy smell.

Lasi was a better surprise than all the costumed dolls the Little Girls loved; better than all the ceramic roosters and frog whistles and painted dishes Mami was always grabbing off the wall and smashing on the floor. Even so, she wished Papi never went away. One time when they first moved to Reparto Playa Nueva, before the little girls had moved in, Papi had come back a day early. Magdalena was sitting on the edge of the front lawn, playing with a nice clay she'd discovered in a puddle after a big rain. She kneaded the fine wet dirt and was forming the letters of her name on the driveway. Missing Papi made him appear. But only that one time. She sensed a presence, Lasi jumped up from her slumber, and there he was, happy to see Magdalena. He'd squatted beside her, kissed her on the top of the head, and shaken his head side to side with admiration. "Look at that. Your name." Everybody was supposed to have a person that was all theirs and Papi was hers.

"What will Papi bring us when he gets back next week?" Lasi turned her head to one side and fixed her gaze on Magdalena who got herself still and gazed back. If she paid attention she would learn to speak dog the way she saw babies learn to talk, by just being around people who talked. Now that school had been out for months she had her chance to learn to talk dog by spending night and day with Lasi. The dog brought her chest to the ground and raised her butt. This meant it was time to bike away. As she pedaled her mind filled with the mystery of The Woman.

Magdalena got the story from Cristinita before the schools closed two months ago and Cristina went all day long to teach old fishermen from Playa Vieja how to read. Cristina was allowed to do anything she wanted and her Mother was happy to see her when she came home. When The Revolution closed the schools so that students could teach analfabetos Cristina's mother let her go. Magdalena begged and pleaded but her own Papi said, "Nunca. I'd rather see you dead." Late that night when they were fighting she heard Papi tell Mami the Revolution had used the church. "They got us to teach them how to do literacy and then told us there would only be one literacy campaign allowed, theirs." Mami smashed the best of the turtle clay whistles. "Don't you care that at last millions are finally learning to read? Who's making you turn against our revolution? Who's la Otra this time? Who's the Diantre? Tell me, who is she?"

Cristina got The Woman's Story from Mayra, her older sister, who was allowed to do anything she wanted. Of course she had joined the Milicia, and now she got to go all over Playa Nueva and Playa Vieja and knew the story of every house. Mami wanted more than anything in the world to be a Miliciana, but Magdalena heard Papi tell her late one night in his preacher voice, "If you join, there's no more marriage." Mami had thrown the big red clay rooster and screamed, "What marriage, you're never home. I do everything. Go to my job. Keep the house. Raise the girl. Pay the bills. Buy the house. I'm married to myself. I'm my own husband and myu own wife. You should have been a priest instead. You don't have time for a family."

Magdalena came to the paved portion of the street close to the avenue, whistled, and Lasi took off running. She biked as hard as she could letting her mind fill with images of The Woman's wedding. Lasi sped ahead. She won every race and waited for Magdalena at the Avenue. Cristina said Mayra showed her El Suceso with the headline WOMAN MARRIES HER OWN SON right on the cover. Mayra had seen the wedding with her own eyes. They'd all stood right in the living room of the Sunset Pink house with the house door wide open.

The wedding couldn't wait because the woman was pregnant although she barely showed. The disgraced priest who did the ceremony wore a blood red guayabera. Magdalena pictured him in the middle of the living room, empty of guests who didn't come. What incantations did he recite to The Woman facing him, beside her husband to be, her own son? The bride wasn't very tall and wore red high heels and a too tight black dress and a small black veil, just a hat. The tall thin brown son with a big jaw and big elbows and big knees wore a black suit. Behind the couple stood the woman's father who was taller than everyone, and dark, with blue white hair and a black moustache, like her Papi. Mayra told Cristina The Woman's mother, round-faced, hair dyed jet black, had cried and cried.

Only two months later, Dona Francisca, the midwife from Playa Vieja, had been called late at night for the birth. The baby had hooves and a tail and tiny horns. Mayra said the baby was born dead. Francisca wrapped it in the sheets it was birthed on, and right then, at one in the morning, she raced with the bundle to the river.It was a moonless night, but as she set off there was a sudden flood of stars. This starlight was from angelwings. God, Mayra said, didn't leave the devil all the room. It had been enough light to walk the pebbled street to where it gave way to dirt, and then maneuver without cracking an ankle the potholes carved into the dirt by tires during the rains, and enough light to get all the way downhill to the Rojo river. Dona Francisca tossed the devil's baby into the eye, where the river spins into itself. She flung the bundle and just as it was about to hit the spinning eye a hand shot out of the water and grabbed the devil's child.

Magdalena caught up to Lasi at the avenue separating the Reparto Playa Nueva from the old fishing town of Playa Vieja and stopped to let the traffic by. "What did the devil do with his baby?" Lasi tilted her head.

As they crossed the central island of the avenue the dog barked at the young militia women on their break from their training. Cristina's older sister Mayra waved to Magdalena from where she stood with a group of young women. "Ven aca." When Magdalena stopped her bike Lasi jumped up, Mayra kneed her off and pointed to the sky. "A Contra just flew away. Maybe that's his plane. He stole it right here, across the road, from the Rebel Air Force Base. He may bomb us so we're being mobilized." Magdalena balanced on one pedal, ready to push off. She took one last close look at the way Mayra had taken in the waist of the men's olive green pants to show her tiny waist and told Lasi, "I can't wait until I'm old enough for the Milicia."

She sped past the Milicianas, made it to the other side of the avenue, and turned onto the narrow street to the center of Playa Vieja where tiny wooden houses had been built long before the Reparto Playa Nueva was even a thought. She found the blue house. She studied it. The deep front garden had become a meadow. She slowed down, then stopped. Lasi plunged into the mass of tall wild grasses. Magdalena watched the bees work their way from the pink to the yellow to the white clumps of tiny flowers. The air over the wild garden swarmed with tiny bugs.

Only last week she had glimpsed the gray haired old man through the side window. Last month she had seen the long-haired, brown young woman standing at her porch gate. She and the little girls called her The Girl, short for The Girl who Married her Own Father. The Girl held the old man's baby right at the front door and was making Juan the viandero show her lots of yucas and malangas and fronds of cilantro, just like any other housewife might have done, as if marrying your own father (and Mayra told Cristina this girl had) happened every day. But today the house was closed. Maybe both The Woman and The Girl had joined the militia her Father wouldn't let her Mother join. Or was today some kind of devil unholy day, and all of them were at a secret ritual? Back on the corner, the Milicianas were lining up, ready to go back to their drills. She stopped, held Lasi's collar, and watched for cars.

She saw Cristinita break away from her sister Mayra and bike toward her. She waited until Cristina pedaled up beside her. "I kissed Chucho." Magdalena looked away. "How is kissing Chucho news?" One afternoon last week after she and Chucho got home from alfabetizacion Cristina made Magdalena stand in Chucho's kitchen looking out for his Mother while she and Chucho necked on the back porch. Through the window right over the sink she'd had to watch Cristina and Chucho lying down on the porch floor, kissing for minutes at a stretch just like in City movies. Cristina leaned closer. "Yes, but I kissed him and I felt his thing." She brought her lips to Magdalena's ear. "Last night Mayra told me that when a man kisses you, or sometimes even when a man thinks about kissing you, his thing gets big and hard. She told me because I was asking her, exactly what do they mean in the novelas when a girl loses her honor? She told me that's when you aren't married and the man puts his hard thing inside you anyway. Like The Woman and her Son!" She pedaled off, back to her fishermen.

Magdalena stood motionless letting the cars go by, holding on hard to Lasi's collar, thrilled by this new truth Cristina had revealed. Hadn't she seen this phenomenon just yesterday when Chucho stopped his bike to tell Cristina his Mother had just left their house? Yes. She'd seen the bulge in his shorts. Could such a thing have happened to her own Bebito, Chucho's cousin, her almost novio, when he talked to her? And now that Bebito had moved away from Playa Nueva back to the Capital, could it be happening to him with some new girl he'd met in his new barrio?

She biked back to the Reparto along the street behind her house until Mami's screams reached her on the afternoon breeze blowing in from the sea. She could tell Mami came home angry from her job as secretary to the Cubans installing microondas at the Rebel Air Force (their revoution helping Ventura's) and then got angrier because even though Magdalena had nothing at all to do all day she was late again for her cafe con leche afternoon merienda. She didn't want Mami's milk with the scum on top but she pedaled home as fast as she could, swerving to avoid the deep holes in the dirt stretch of the road. She could already see the graveled street that had been waiting for the entire three years her family had lived here (ever since Mami talked the contractor into a bargain for being the first buyer, and pulled together the down payment by not paying bills for three months) for the concrete and asphalt the contractors had promised in their sales pitch.

Senora Alvarez, the contractor's very big wife, stood at the doorway of the their shack just before the gravel started. "Magdalena, so good to see you!." She didn't have to say. It was easy to see she was always happy to see her. She waved Magdalena over, bent down to offer her cheek for a kiss, then kissed Lasi's snout. Mami was calling, screaming, but Magdalena leaned her bicycle against the Alvarez' shack. She'd get a better merienda here. She couldn't take her eyes away from the woman's hugeness. Alvarez, the creator of the Reparto Playa Nueva, stood at his tall work table looking at his enormous blueprints, eating Chocolatina cookies, the best merienda there was. He was big too. How did he look just like his wife except with a thin, brown moustache? Maybe Mayra would know if the Senora was the sister who married her own brother? Maybe they had no children because their babies were born dead with hooves and tails. Alvarez' pale green guayabera stuck to his back, sweaty despite the fan constantly turning, and despite the shaded coolness of their shack built under the one old tree his bulldozers had not yet ripped up.

Senora Alvarez poured Magdalena a glass of sweet tamarindo drink from her big thermos. She took from her husband's table the box of Chocolatinas in their colored tinfoil wraps, and handed it to Magdalena. She'd never held an entire box. Senora Alvarez wouldn't care if Magdalena ate them all. She took a handful. "More, take more." She took another green one, unwrapped the shining foil, and slowly nibbled off the outside layer of chocolate and then bit into the thin crisp cookie.

Senora Alvarez didn't have a little girl but she had a pair of shepherd dogs. She was saying her female was not well, and maybe she was pregnant. Did Magdalena want a puppy? She gave Lasi pieces of white cheese she brought from home for her. Magdalena unwrapped an orange Chocolatina, licked and chewed. Senora Alvarez said her mangos would soon be ripe. They were just like bizcochuelos. She would bring her some. She bent toward Magdalena and studied her face."If you don't take care you will be getting pimples. A girl your age has to start washing her face with rice water. I'll bring you some from home. Holy remedy." Magdalena nodded.

The big woman drew closer. "You must be very careful. There are older women who like to get too close to little girls." Suddenly, Magdalena clearly heard her mother's screams, now very angry, rising over the fan's whir, and over the groaning of the concrete mixer behind the shack. She drank down the tamarindo, unwrapped the red cookie, the last, put the whole thing in her mouth and put the shiny papers into her shorts' pocket.

She lunged the bike onto the hard, packed mud of the dirt path and sped away. She turned around to call for Lasi who lagged behind because Senora Alvarez was still feeding her white cheese. Her front wheel hit a rock inside a pothole, swerved. As she fell face forward her chin hit the pedal. The big woman ran toward her but Magdalena was gone, gone. With Lasi right behind her she pedaled as fast as she could past the identical Alvarez houses, each with its own brilliant coat of paint: fuschia, lizard green, blue, sunset pink. She reached her own magenta house, the very first in the row, the very first the Alvarez' had sold, the only one still without an iron gate around the porch. She ran inside. She had one instant of comfort in the scented cool shade of the mariposa vine. She caught sight of her mother waiting at the door and for one instant she could tell Mami meant to love her, but she just couldn't figure out how.

Magdalena approached with Lasi at her heel, went inside, watched her mother slam shut the door. Pieces of green ceramic were scattered on the brown and white floor tiles. She braced her feet and clenched her fists and never once looked up while her mother hit her full force with her open hand on the ass then gripped her with both hands on the shoulders and dug in her nails. She called her Diantre. Diantre was her Mother's way to not say diablo because saying devil was a sin. How could it be that to Mami Magdalena was a poweful force to be vanquished? Diantre was what Mami called "La Otra" she accused Papi of having. When she was done Magdalena walked slowly to her bedroom with Lasi at her side. She saw in her dresser mirror that when she had fallen the bike pedals had made two little cuts under her chin. Two trickles of bright red blood still flowed from the little wounds. "Secret tears,"she said to Lasi and watched her tilt her head and moan.

She followed Lasi under the bed and curled herself around her dog. "She hates me because she knows Papi loves me more than he loves her." Lasi made a tiny whine. "I know. Who would love her?" Magdalena stared at the mesh of wire that held up her new mattress Mami had bargained down and bought. For one moment she noticed the ache on her ass and on her shoulders, then she forgot. A tear began to well. It stopped. A scream began to rise, but didn't. She clutched Lasi hard. Just then she heard little fists pound on the glass panes of her window. Her little girls! Magdalena rolled from under the bed. She stopped in the bathroom and scrubbed off the dry blood on her chin and neck. She ran to the living room door and let in the three little girls.

Small dark Gloria with her short curly hair took Magdalena's hand. "Wait till you see what I have." Tall blonde Silvia with agua de violeta scented braids skipped ahead. Plump brown haired Miriam with her boy's haircut ran both hands up and down Lasi's rump. When Magdalena went to the Evangelical Campamento in the interior and Lasi refused to eat what Dona Francisca fed her, it had been Miriam who got Lasi to eat. The girls trooped ahead into the bedroom, past the table with the tiles Magdalena found in the Alvarez' dump and painted herself, each with it's own fairy tale scene, to the doll cabinet Magdalena painted right over the termite sores using leftover sunset pink paint Senora Alvarez gave her when she asked. Miriam took the Indian boy doll and sat down on the tiles by the bed.

Gloria pulled out from the pocket of her shorts folded up pages she'd torn from the last El Suceso. "Read this." Magdalena took the papers. Whatever the little girls asked of her was important. She could show grownups, especially Mami, just how children should be treated. She was glad to be the only big girl who liked playing with the little ones. The pictures from El Suceso printed in brown ink showed a man with a huge belly, and then a monster dead infant with a beard. "They say he ate his own brother in his mother's belly before he was born." Magdalena read on. "And then he was pregnant with him his whole life!" They looked at each other and held back laughter. She pointed to the monster baby photo. "And then they cut the creature out of him." She turned the page over. "And then the man died." The little girls laughed, pretended to cry, laughed more.

Gloria knelt by the sunset pink cabinet, studied the many dolls Magdalena's Papi brought her from his evangelism travels, and took everybody's favorite, the tall, white haired princess doll. She put the doll's clockwork heart to her ear then kissed the doll."Hola Princesa."

Silvia took the second best blonde ballerina.

Miriam waved her Indian, the only boy doll, who was the Prince.

Magdalena took the cellophane nurse doll given to her on one of her rounds by Francisca, the curandera and devil's baby midwife from Playa Vieja. She held back the urge to squeeze the tiny Fairy Godmother flat.. Why had the old woman given her the doll? Why was she afraid to play with any other? If Papi really made them go North, to the City, she'd have to take this ugly doll.

The little girls looked up at Magdalena and sat in a circle on the cool floor tiles. Lasi stretched beside them with her head on her paws. Magdalena sat in their midst like their queen, or their comandante, because right then, although not one of them bothered to look, the Militia was marching past the house.

She handed the girls the colored tinfoil Chocolatina wrappers.

"Mira, mira, mira." Gloria grabbed the red one to drape around her Princesa then waltzed her to the center of the ballroom. "My Papi said this morning that he saw shooting in the Capital." She stood the Princesa close to Miriam's boy doll.

Miriam made the Prince a crown with the green foil. "Today a contra took off in a plane from the airport right across our road."

Yesterday the girls had argued, and today it was Silvia's ballerina's turn to be discovered as the real Cinderella by Miriam's Prince. She made golden Chocolatina slippers for the ballerina and moved her toward the Prince. "I wish they wouldn't fight any more."

"May I have this dance." Miriam spoke in the deep voice that turned the Indian boy doll into the Prince. Magdalena considered telling the little girls the phenomenon that happened to men when they saw a woman they liked. She decided to keep the secret. A good mother protected her daughters. Magdalena danced the Fairy Godmother along to protect the ballerina. Gloria set down her doll and pushed Silvita's hand until the ballerina doll's face touched the Indian boy's. "Cristina kisses my cousin Chucho with her tongue inside his mouth, I saw it." She held the doll's faces together for a long doll kiss.

After the kiss was done Gloria set down her doll. "Take us to the river." Magdalena could hear her Mother making corn meal with brown sugar, their usual supper when Papi wasn't home, and money was low at the end of the month. The secret to being good to children was to remember to almost always say yes, like Senora Alvarez. Walking softly so her Mother in the kitchen didn't hear, Magdalena walked out the front door with the girls. There were still two good long hours before a silent dinner without Papi. The four girls bicycled with Magdalena at the lead, and Lasi trailing after them, down to the Rojo river. They hid their bikes in the bushes and walked to the flat wide rock. From that spot they could watch both the bikes and the red water rushing many feet below. Two boys jumped feet first one after the other into the smooth water pool not far from the drowning remolino. Gloria pointed to the whirlpool. "That was where the hand came out of the water and took the Devil's baby. Cristina showed me."

Gloria grabbed Magdalena's hand. "That's the boy." She pointed to the tall boy. The short boy was just jumping into the river knees to chest.

"I don't think it's the same boy." Miriam squatted and tossed a stone just behind where he was standing. He turned around and waved.

"It is the boy. It is." Gloria waved back. Lasi ran down to where the boy stood and sniffed him. He tossed Lasi a stick and watched her chase it. The short boy made his way up the steep river bank and together the boys played tag with Lasi.

"The Devil's boy? He was born dead." Magdalena began to edge the girls back to their bikes. "Don't throw stones. Don't stare. Don't make them come up here."

"No, the Boy Who Feeds His Mother. Mayra told Cristina he lives on the other side of the river." Gloria pointed to the trees on the other shore. "See the smoke. He's cooking her a pig. His mother is so big she can't get out of the house, or cook. Mayra says that all day long he has to go out to pick mangos for her, or to kill a whole pig for her and cook it in a hole in the ground. She eats a whole pig in one sitting. Even the liver and the blood pudding." Gloria walked closer to the edge of the lookout rock. "Look, now he jumped right into the eye where the hand came out of the water to catch the Devil Baby." Magdalena gently pushed Gloria toward the bikes. At last the little girls set off to walk the bikes to the dirt road. Magdalena held back. She waited for Lasi and watched until the boy surfaced and climbed uphill with his friend. She waited to see whether or not the long, flat, green rocks by the water turned back into crocodiles. Just as Lasi reached her Magdalena saw one of the rocks stir. She ran as fast as she could to her bike.

"He will never come back up," Gloria said.
"That's the bottomless spot," Miriam said.
Magdalena, who'd seen him walk away, said nothing.

She bicycled Miriam to her door on the street behind her own. Next she dropped Gloria off at her turquoise house next door to Chucho's lime green house. The little girl's house was exactly the same model as Magdalena's but very clean (her mother didn't work outside the house) and had an enclosed garage for her father's fancy car. She bicycled past her own magenta house, in the direction of the avenue, and dropped off Silvia at her sand colored house built by a different contractor. It had two stories, but until recently, no Father. He went into exile in Cuba during the uprising in the Interior, not long after the house was finished, and only recently came back, after the Triunfo de la Revolucion de Ventura.

She waved to Silvia and bicycled the few remaining yards to the avenue. Lasi stretched out on the road, ready for the long wait for a break in the flow of cars coming home to Playa Vieja from the Capital. She looked up at the sky now empty of contra planes. Soldiers in green camouflage and milicianos in olive green marched along the avenue's central island. Mobilized.

At last she crossed the avenue and rode all the way to the street where the blue house stood. She bicycled past the jungle garden of the moonblue house of the Girl Who Married Her Own Father. She was standing at her door holding her baby. Lasi ran right up and sniffed her. Magdalena didn't mean to catch the Girl's eye. She shuddered. It was a coal black pebble. She sped away. Close to home she slowed down to pass the sunset pink house of the Woman Who Married Her Own Son. The gate was locked, but she saw through the open front door the woman bent over her mop, sweeping it in big circles and dancing to a loud mambo on the radio. She biked as fast as she could. Was the green car behind her following her? She went faster, faster, faster. Papi had said if any man ever followed her in a car she was to run into any house and ask for help. She pictured herself knocking at the door of the very house of the man who was chasing her. What door could she possibly knock on, when all of these houses held so much danger?

Magdalena plunged into the river's eye. She lay limp in the grip of the current. Red water swirled around her. She let it carry her to a red river sand bank. The bank was in the center where four rivers entered the Rojo. She sat, waist deep in water, her eyes washed red, the whole world red. The river was not so bad. This red world was not so bad. She heard a rumble, a rising drumming, a laugh! Just before the first tongue of river exploded a wall of rushing water, the river laughed! Magdalena let her body lie limp as the wall of brown water hit her, swirled around her. The next water wall came from just behind her left side; another from just behind her right. She let the red foaming water push and turn her. The waters rose and came upon her from the right, pushing, burning her with bits of glassy red sand and blinding her whole world red.

Mami's voice pierced her sleep. She woke up.
"Who have you been talking with? Who's changed you? Who's La Otra this time?"
Papi had gotten home in the middle of the night.
"We're leaving." He spoke in his preacher voice.
Mami got louder. "You leave. I'm not going to go."
"It's decided."
"I'm not going."
"I'm leaving. You're leaving. We're all going to go. I'm not going to raise my daughter here to be indoctrinated and taken from me."
"That's not the way it's going to be. I'm staying and tomorrow I'm joining the Milicia."

Magdalena trembled in the blue light of her bedroom. She had tossed off her sheet fighting the dreamwaters. She curled into herself against the dawning chill. She had to pee. She set her feet on the cold brownswirled tile and almost wet herself. Coffins! She felt a wave of nausea when she saw Papi's two enormous suitcases in the hallway.

Dona Francisca, the fix everything curandera from Playa Vieja, showed up on time, no matter how hard Magdalena had willed her not to come. Magdalena rolled from under her bed. Lasi crawled out behind her. Magdalena let her into the house. Mami was never home now that she was in the Milicia. Francisca wanted some cola and then she said, "We have to go." In the sunlight Magdalena studied through the woman's starched threadbare housedress the mystery of her breasts. They drooped in one huge round mass down to Francisca's waist.

Francisca walked a few paces ahead along the edge of the gravel road still without the Alvarez' promised sidewalk. She pulled Lasi on a rope. Magdalena waved to Silvia who sat on her porch with the ballerina doll Magdalena said she got to keep. Gloria had gotten Princesa, Miriam the Indian Boy Prince. Francisca walked fast. Magdalena lagged behind. Lasi followed, wagging her innocent tail. They passed the sunset pink house of the woman who married her own son. The gate was padlocked and the door was shut. Francisca didn't even sneak a look. Had she forgotten? As they crossed the avenue they heard bits of the Militia's afternoon drill skimming the wind. Mami was with them.

Heading for the center of Playa Vieja they turned into a narrow street and walked past the weathered wood houses once as brilliant as the houses of the Reparto Playa Nueva. Francisca didn't look when they passed the blue house, not at the baby sitting smack in the middle of the mane of grass, in the swarm of gnats, in the devil buzz of bugs; not at the Mother, a skinny cinderella, mopping the narrow porch. Magdalena stared right at the woman's face, looking for the coal hard eyes.

The bodega, made of plastered, white washed brick, stood high off the ground on a corner and had doors on both streets. Magdalena stood outside while Francisca took Lasi up the steps into the men's door. Three men at the counter drinking pee colored beer in bottles turned to stare. Two women climbed down the other door with their week's rice and beans. Francisca walked past the drinkers, and handed the bodeguero the dog's rope. Magdalena saw Lasi tilt her head to one side. Francisca had to yank her hand to pull her away. When they turned the corner Lasi began to howl.

On the way back, just past the blue house, Magdalena doubled over and screamed. Francisca sat her down on a big rock by the side of the street. She clutched Magdalena's hand. Magdalena pointed to her lower belly. The pain was too terrible to speak. It took an hour to walk home, stopping every few feet to wait out the pain. "Now you're a Senorita." Francisca kissed Magdalena and went away.

Alone in her own bathroom she leaned against the bathroom door, pulled down her panties and saw two lipshaped stripes of blood. More secret blood tears. Here was one thing Mayra and Cristina hadn't been lying about after all.

Magdalena lay under her bed with Lasi, eyes closed. Cristina's Ouija had said Bebito would come to see her. But it had been her own hands making the Ouija move. Did she believe her own hands? She wasn't like Cristina or like Mayra, teaching analfabetos, mobilizing, kissing boys. She was The Girl Nothing Would Ever Happen To. She recognized Gloria's fists pounding on her half shut glass windows. "Come out. He's here."

Magdalena slipped into her sandals and met Gloria by the gravel street. Besides being the Man Magdalena Should Marry, beautiful brown Bebito was Gloria's cousin. "He's waiting for you behind Silvia's." She made her way through the shoulder high flowering weeds. This moment so often wrongly divined by the Ouija, a moment she had longed for since Bebito's family moved back to the Capital months ago, now felt like it wasn't happening at all. There he stood, at the end of the path the girls had worn in the lot between Magdalena's house and Silvia's, the lot where Magdalena, Cristina, Chucho and Bebito had played revolucion when they were still children and still played. For a second she didn't know him in the olive green militia uniform. "Look." He stretched out his hand. The gun he held was enormous. She stepped back.
"Is it true you are going to the City?"
She nodded."My Papi and I. My Mother's a miliciana. Tomorrow she's going back to her family in the Capital."
He put away the gun. They walked in step around Silvia's concrete fence.
She swallowed hard. "Some girls my age have novios."
He shook his head. "I'm only going to have one novia. The one I'm going to marry." He holstered the gun. "I'm going to engineering school. I won't be getting married for a long time."
"You're not going to be a doctor after all?"
"The Venturan Revolution needs engineers.I may be sent to Cuba to study engineering there."
They stood in silence. Behind him she could see the deep pink of the sun setting over Playa Vieja. He started to walk away, stopped, came back, leaned forward, kissed her on the lips and ran. She watched until he reached the avenue and turned and she couldn't see him any more. Now she was a girl who had been kissed.

That night she was wakened by scratching on her windows. Lasi. She ran to the front door and let her in. The rope she had broken to run away from the bodega hung shredded from her neck, mudblack. Magdalena cut if off. She let Lasi in her bed. She smelled of bacalao. Tomorrow she would have to pay for this with a beating but now she nestled into Lasi's furry neck. Everyone got to have one person who was theirs and she was Lasi's. Others failed at this. They disappointed. Mami couldn't figure out how to love. Papi was making her go. But she, Magdalena was no supposed to disappoint Lasi and her Little Girls. That had been her pact and they were making her fail. She sobbed.

As the coffin suitcases were loaded into the white Plymouth, the black Chinese lacquered furniture was being loaded into the magenta house. Magdalena didn't look closely at the short plump woman directing the movers, or her two teenaged girls who would now be sleeping in her room, on her new colonial bed, because the buyers had gotten most of the furniture.

She stood out in the empty lot glad that it was early in the morning and up and down the block the houses' windows were shut. Francisca who was going to keep Lasi, waited on the porch. Magdalena knelt by Lasi, hugged her hard, and sobbed. She walked the full length of the driveway never once looking up and then took Mami's old place on the front seat.

She watched her dog chase after the car, past the sunset pink house of the woman who married her own son, and the blue house of the one who married her own father. Lasi chased the car the way she did every time the family drove away. Magdalena knew there was no way Lasi could know this time was the very last.

Angels

Before the family woke up Luisa surveyed her handiwork and it was good. The old wooden table with the embroidered cloth under the clear vinyl held the chipped matched dishes with the border of little pink roses that Pablo's Mother had given to her before they got married. In the center of the table a blue plastic platter held the stack of pancakes she had just fried up. The blue cups with cafe con leche were each at their place; Pablo's mostly coffee with a little milk; the children's mostly milk with drops of coffee for a bit of color. The scrubbed cast aluminum caldero was draining by the sink. The blue enamel coffee pot and the steel milk pot sat waiting on the stove for Pablo's second cup if he had time.

She walked to the sink and ran water into the tall juice can she had squeezed to make a pouring spout. She carried it with both hands to the window. She poured water into the three plants she had grown from seed: an avocado with its big eye-shaped leaves, a grapefruit with tiny tear-shaped leaves; and her pride, a tall mango with deep green shiny blade-shaped leaves, and always, new purple shoots. She had grown it from a mango Pablo had smuggled in from the Island, past the agriculture inspectors, so ripe the pit had already shot a root. Everyone who saw it marveled that she had
gotten it to grow in the City.

She stood by the window and looked down at the quiet street, nobody about except one man bundled up to his ears hurrying to the train station. One day she would go down herself and sweep up the bits of newspaper, the paper cups, the dirty diapers in the gutter, to have the pleasure of seeing the street in order in the morning, like she was having now the pleasure of seeing her house in order in the morning. She breathed in the smell of wet earth. With her eyes closed, she could almost capture the early morning moment on the Island. She shook off this longing for that other life, that deeper, richer dirt. She opened her eyes and stepped back from the window. Last week she had washed the sheer frilled pale yellow curtains. She beheld them and the light coming through them. It was good.

Luisa walked to the children's room, stood by their door, gazed at them. She held this moment just before she woke the children. She stood at the door watching the light coming in, eyelashes of light, through the rool-up blinds on the windows. "Wake up angels." She rubbed the backs of the children at the shoulder blades where she told them each and every day that she was feeling for feathers, because in the night they were angels, angels in their sleep, flying around the Barrio, doing miracles."Wake up angel." Luisi opened his eyes. She saw him startle, remember where he was, where he was not.

"What miracle did you do last night?"
A shadow darkened his gaze. She regretted making him remember he had not done the one miracle that needed doing. She should not make the angel joke again. She discovered with shame the joke was cruel. Why make Luisi feel in his imagination he could fix his Mother when in real life he could not? It's a silly Abuela joke."

Luisi's eyes went straight to the photo of his mother on the small table, now painted white, Luisa had salvaged from a neighbor's trash. In the photo Graciela's face was scrunched up against the sun. She wore white. The photo of Graciela holding Luisi's hand, he was also dressed in white, was washed by light. They were on the roof. You could see one side of Pablo's pigeon coop, see the diamond shaped wire mesh and half of one of the perched pigeons. Then you could see her son Pablito's hand holding Graciela's. Only his hand. The rest of Pablito didn't get into the picture. Luisa remembered taking that picture the day Luisi turned three. June 19. They had all gone to the roof to take pictures before the cake and ice cream while Pablito's white clothes were still clean.

Graciela looked happy, light clean. With her face scrunched up and with her husband and her baby holding each of her hands, her terrible restlessness was not visible. Pablo had opened the coop and the pigeons had flown out and up and swooped across the flat blue summer sky. Even then, trying as she had not to see that terrible restlessness, Luisa had already known. The street was a dark wing, virulent.

Nobody had told Luisa when Pablito told her he'd gotten a 15 year old pregnant, who the 15 year old was, where the girl came from. He was 15 himself. When he brought the pale blonde thing into the house, they'd stood together by the door. Children themselves. Just children. And then Graciela walked over to the kitchen window to look at Luisa's avocado tree. Light hit the blonde, feather curls. That was when Luisa first made up her secret joke about angels. That Graciela was a fallen angel; that the baby she was bearing was an angel; even the conception was an angel's doing and not the result of her son doing what Pablo had told him not to do, what she had never mentioned but intended with every fiber of her being he never do. Even with her face scrunched up Graciela looked like Luisa. Everyone said she looked more like Luisa than Luisa's own son.

She shook Luisi gently."How about pancakes today?"
Because she woke up at five anyway she made the children big breakfasts. She filled them up with everything she could at home, food, kisses, hugs. She covered them with protections: starched plaid Catholic school uniforms, gold chains with crosses, black azabache fists pinned to their undershirts.

Now Luisi sat on the edge of the bed and began to pull on his starched tan pants and stiff white shirt. Luisa turned to Gracey. She sat her up, still half asleep, against the pillows. She unbuttoned the little girl's flannel pajamas with the sheep pattern on it. She pulled the plaid uniform dress over her head. She took the washcloth from her housecoat pocket and gently touched it to Gracey's eyes. Sometimes Luisa hated taking Gracey from her dreams. She laughed out loud. She almost did believe the children were angels in their sleep.

She walked the half sleeping children to the kitchen table. Pablo had already almost finished his pancakes and was draining the last of his cafe con leche. She poured him his second cup, sat between him and the children, fed them spoonfuls of syrup soaked pancakes. Pablo stood, bent down to kiss her goodbye on the cheek, and squeezed her arm.

Luisa stood by the window and saw the three figures leave the building: Pablo with his brown brimmed hat and the collar of his long brown coat turned up. The children in their fluffy quilted jackets, his blue, hers bright pink. Graciela had brought the pink coat for Gracey the last time she'd turned up three weeks ago, brought it with a look of shamed surprise on her face as if she had just stumbled onto one of the things a mother does. Maybe she had once as a little girl gotten around to do what every little girl does which is dress up girl dolls. She watched until they turned the corner and then stood staring at the street. From looking at Graciela that first day, looking like Luisa herself, there was no way she could have dreamed what kind of little girl Graciela had been, already a second generation on the street. She shuddered at her imagination of Graciela's childhood, the child of a junkie mother; fatherless; watching her mother turn tricks. Maybe Pablito was her own first trick.

She heated milk, poured it into a cup, poured coffee into the very center of the milk, spooned sugar into it, and stirred. She sat at the kitchen table facing the window and she sipped her coffee. She clenched her jaw against the rising tide of grief. One tear rolled down her cheek. She savored the sweet, earthy taste of the cafe con leche. Coffee taste was the way earth would taste, wet earth would taste, if it could. She smiled. It was her deepest duty as a mother to remember life was good; she had trained herself to make this island of life of her own home good; polish it clean and good; frill its curtains light and good; remember it was good and make it good. And now, she did. She put herself in mind of how the other day she had said to Luisi, if you chase your sister in the house again and make me scream I will send you out to the mother who gave you birth and he had turned to her with those caramel eyes twinkling,and almost giggled when he said, you are the mother who gave me birth. She smiled. Luisi's smile washed clean even Graciela's darkwinged shadow.

Luisa stood a few feet away from the other mothers outside the school steps. They were almost girls and she half-listened to their talk about hair dyes and clothes. If only Pablito had gotten together with one of them. That one with the braided curls. But he hadn't. She moved further into the shade of the gingko tree.

The school door opened and despite the Sisters' efforts at order, the line of children poured down the stairs, spilling and splashing kids. Luisa smiled as she saw her two approaching. Luisi held Gracey's hand until he got sight of her and then let it go, to run to her.
"Ice cream?"
"Were you good?"
He nodded. Gracey stood behind him. "By the river?"
Luisa walked down to the river park with them, to the playground.
"Chocolate," Luisi said to Don Silvio.
"Chocolate," Don Silvio repeated, flattening the la and te into Spanish.
"Chocolate," Gracey said, the Spanish way.
Luisa sat on a bench to watch the children flying on the swings. Behind them, beyond them, she watched the flowing river, one lone sailboat pushed by the wind flitted by. The wind, invisible, embraced her, and on it her two angel children flew their swings.

They got home. She fed them. She set Pablo's dinner in tinfoil to keep warm inside the oven. She bathed the children. She settled them in their flannel pajamas in the living room to do their homework on the coffee table, no tv until they did. She settled herself near them in Pablo's recliner to watch La Perdida Santa with the volume low. She watched in the safety of knowing that La Perdida would be saved by the last episode. What would happen to her own perdida? She glanced over to the children. Were they mindful of the silly fairy tale of the telenovela? But Luisi, his face close to the marble notebook, erased with even strokes, so hard the page would surely tear; and Gracey copied over a long list of spelling words, each word five times.

She dozed until she heard Pablo's key in the door.
"Que susto, Pablo. I caught a fright."
She sat with him and watched him say a prayer over his plate of rice, beans, and chicken in salsa.
"I just dreamed of Graciela."
"Woman, por Dios, you and your dreams."
Later, after the children were sleeping, in the blue moonlit darkness of their bedroom, Pablo looked at Luisa in her white nightgown already almost asleep, saw her graying yellow brown hair loose around her smooth round face and remembered the young Luisa. In the dark, it was still possible to see the lush young beauty, the ripe woman's beauty. Sometimes, in this light, he still saw the most beautiful woman he had ever seen, an angel.
He slid under the covers beside her, and molded his body to her. His face against the back of her head, smelling her manzanilla scented hair, his chest againt her back, his groin against her ass able even in his exhaustion and his age to feel a stirring. Now, this was enough, this stirring had a fullness, it was complete.
"Now, we make love like the angels."
Luisa shook. Was she laughing or sobbing?
"What did you dream about Graciela?" He had been afraid to ask. He was afraid of Luisa's dreams. "Nothing." He was glad she wanted to keep the secret. Sleep was overtaking him and there was only so much he could bear to know at night.

Next morning after everyone was gone, Luisa knew there would be a knock on the door. She knew when she opened the door she would find Graciela on the other side. She sipped her coffee and waited. The knock came. She opened. She did not recognize Graciela at first. She let her in and sat her down. Without asking she poured her cafe con leche and brought out a loaf of bread. Graciela was so skinny Luisa wanted to feed her. She wanted to get her out of the house. But she also wanted to feed her. She set the cafe con leche by Graciela on the table and turned away from her. She looked in the refrigerator for last night's leftover rice and beans to heat up. She put the pots on the stove. She remembered her dream with Graciela in a plain pine box. She shuddered.

She let her gaze rest on the child. She was bone thin. Her eyes had the zombie cast she had seen before in nobody who had come to a good end and they were the hardest to take. She had her hair bleached light, and permed. It stuck out brittle and wirey around her wizened face, all eyes and red-painted lips. Luisa struggled to keep her eyes away from the tight black tube top, pushing tight against boy flat nipples, from the short, tight red skirt showing hip bones and yellowing skin. God forgive me, but who would want to pay to be with her now?
"I want my kids back."

Luisa sat down beside Graciela and put her hand on her skinny hand. "I know you want your kids back."
"I'm ready for my kids. I've got a new old man."
Luisa slapped Graciela's face.
"You want your kids. They are beautiful kids. They want their mother. But you can not have them."
"Let me see them. "
Luisa took a deep breath. How could she have hit this child? But to come rub some pimp in her own mother-in-law's face. And Graciela didn't even notice the blow. Was she that numb from the drugs, was she that used to being hit?
"They're in school. Don't you know what time it is?"
Luisa got up to heat last night's rice and beans and spoon them on a plate. She set the plate down. "Now eat. Even if you aren't hungry. You're turning into a sack of bones."
Graciela looked at the food and picked up the fork and brought one small mound of rice to her lips. A shadow lifted from Graciela's gaze. Luisa thought she saw one instant of clear sobriety before the addict's body shifted to wanting the next fix. One instant when Graciela clearly saw the food in front of her, the good mother beside her, this other life she gave up for the street. How quickly she had gone from coming home late, to coming home late drunk, to coming home late high, to not coming home at all. Just for that one moment Luisa saw Graciela see everything she'd lost. Then the shadow returned to those zombie eyes of hers.

Luisa waited until Graciela had eaten as much as she would eat: a few mouthfuls of plain rice, a taste of beans.

"You have to go now. The police was here looking for you last week. I told them I hadn't seen you. I didn't know where you were. But if people see you here..."

Graciela rose. She rushed to the door.

Luisa picked up the dish and the cup and stood at the sink letting hot water run and run and run on them. She bent over with the weight of her tears, flowing, flowing, flowing from her eyes in two streams. She had lied to Graciela. There had been no police. She burned with the shame of it. She was keeping a mother from her own children. But there was nothing she wouldn't do to keep Luisi and Gracey from seeing her like this. She remembered on the Island the brown dog, a bitch, she had watched birthing puppies in the middle of the front room, birthing them, dropping them, looking at them bewildered and walking on, only to drop another pup, look at it and keep going. In all she had dropped five pups and had not known to lick off their sacks or nudge them to the tits, not known even to lie down beside them, even to lie down at all, even to make a place where she and they could rest. All of the puppies died.

She closed the faucet, dried the dishes, put them back in the metal cupboard by the sink. She covered the pots and returned them to the refrigerator. She wiped the table. She wiped every trace of Graciela. When she saw the children she would not tell; when she saw Pablo she would not tell because mention of Graciela made him tremble with rage; Luisa must protect him, protect them all, protect those she could still protect. It would be as if Graciela truly had not been there, like not telling a dream.

She found her two children's faces among the gathered boys and girls in the two first front pews. All the girls in their Christ bride white dresses, all the boys in their navy blue suits. The church air was dusty, stippled. Sun-gilt light streamed shell-pink through the stained glass of the windows where Joseph fought eternally with his angel. Elsa squeezed Pablo's hand on her left and Pablito's on her right. The window was like one of those laboratory slides Pablito had to look through in High School the year he dropped out to marry Graciela, and that he had snuck out in his coat pocket just to show to her through the lightbulb in the living room lamp. "See, Ma? A slice of tree." She had dreamed that he might have grown to be an expert of trees, a knower of the names of all the trees, of the secret inner workings of the trees. Through the lightbulb you could only see sheer brown.
This Joseph fighting angel church window was the same; a slice of the world held in glass to be studied. She was an expert on fighting angels. For today, the world was fine, fine. In the church the angel wars stayed safely behind glass. It was a place not for fighting angels but for looking at the fight; looking at the blessed mother's eternal smile; looking at the parading saints each with its task; but all of them fixed behind the glass; inside the statues; so that they could be contemplated. Luisa sighed.

She remembered that just when she thought Pablito's first communion was starting it was over. This time she paid attention. Pablito's childhood had been like that; just when she noticed he was learning to walk, he was running; just when she noticed he was learning to talk, he was talking. With Luisi and Gracey she paid attention. Luisi walked to the front, his gaze steady, his face serious, not grim, wise. Thank you God, that he is fine. Gracey walked forward smiling a pure, sweet, child smile, still a child. Thank you God, that she is fine. And then their moment was over and it was time for other children. Luisa watched. The sphere of her protection extended to her own beside her, to the children, to all the children. Thank you God, that they are fine. She closed her eyes with her own silent prayer and when she opened them it was time to file outside.

She burst with her husband and her son and her two grandchildren into the blazing May noon sun. She felt giddy, almost as if she were drunk. For an instant of sun blindness she stood outside the church door at the top of the stairs. Graciela was the first thing she saw. She was standing at the bottom of the church steps. She'd dressed in a Sunday green dress Luisa remembered, except that now it hung limp against her thinness. Had she been inside the church? She stood on very high heels seeming to move with the breeze, so light, so slight.

Luisi saw her too. Calling Mami he let go of Luisa's hand and ran down the steps. Gracey, calling Mami, followed. Walking down, slowly, slowly, Luisa saw Graciela pick up first Luisi and then Gracey and swing them in the air. Pablito gave them baths; Graciela spun them like a Daddy. Could this be right?

Luisa reached them. Pablito and Pablo walked away not looking at Graciela, or the flying children. They kept on walking and turned the corner. Graciela set Gracey down as Luisa reached her. Just for a second their gazes locked and suddenly Graciela gripped Luisa by the shoulders, squeezed her to her chest, lifted her in the air and spun her too, spun her, spun, her, spun her. In another moment it would be all gone, but just for now Luisa felt euphoria. The children clasped hands and spun in circles on their toes. Graciela spun Luisa. Luisa flew.

After Marx

"I felt the knife against my back. I didn't look at the man. I let him steer me into the alley, that narrow alley by the supermarket, next to the high rises by Mama's old building. I had anticipated this moment many times in my mind and now that it was here I just watched it happen. The man shoved his fist into my mouth. His entering burned."

Iris listened to the distant gunshots through the partly opened soot blackened window. Beyond it she saw the block buildings of the housing project. She stared at her motionless sister. Was that a flicker in the eyeball? She snapped the shutter of her camera. Ada did not move. Iris placed the gift wrapped orange chrysanthemums on her sister's lap.

"I could see the single yellow eyeball of the street lamp. He entered me standing, from behind. His entering burned. I felt him come at a huge distance." Iris whispered. "City police reports call You and I anonymous nonentities in harm's way, the victims of strangers."

Ada looked straight ahead. Iris looked at her watch. In another minute the nurse would come to bathe her sister. She took the flowers, unwrapped them, put water from the corner sink into the vase, and pushed the flowers hard into the water. She leaned forward and kissed Ada's smooth, cool cheek.

The man was saying his name was Jorge. Iris stood beside him in the center of the living room. She looked away from him at the huge red Party flag on the wall, the red drapes over the high bay window, the framed Party Congress posters with their images of fists and flames taken from her photographs. The other man remained on the low couch by the desk where Rodolfo must write his speeches and the incomprehensible theoretical articles for REDENCION. The man fingered the book he'd taken from the many tomes of theory lining the other walls. He pretended to read. The tall man who said his name was Jorge had the stiff, starched, tan look of an Island intellectual just arrived in the City.

"In France they have discovered a form of thinking that has outdated Marx," he said.

Iris let herself fall into the armchair. The man, with his Island arrogance, frightened her even before he spoke. But this petite bourgeois blasphemy! No thinking could transcend the thinking that had discovered the motor of history, the axles and pulleys on which moments and faces rode like ants. What other thinking had explained her to herself, named her pain Imperialism, named what was ailing her sister Ada oppression, and named their healing: Class War?

The man was a deluded, petite bourgeois fool. She saw the uniform of his class: the linen guayabera, the linen pants. She looked away from the mask face: the rictus of arrogance, the elevated, distant gaze, the perfect mustache. She fixed on the useless long fingered hands with their glossy, manicured nails, hands that had never wired a bomb.

He towered before her, then glanced behind himself at the other man. Iris saw him tell the man with his eyes to leave the room. She studied these secret, silent codes of male talk the way she had studied the language of street dogs on her one visit to the Island as a child. She watched the other man look at his empty wine glass and rise. Salsa blasted into the room when he pushed open the double doors. He pushed them shut behind him. She listened for the bass through the wall. She wished she were with the others, dancing.

The Island intellectual bent down and shoved his face against Iris's. She saw her alien prettiness reflecting, curved in his glasses. Whose was this pretty, funhouse face? She felt his hot, winey, wet tongue pushing against her lips. What did he think? That having stunned her with the unthinkable news from France he could now kiss her? All the Island guys thought City women militants
were easy.

"Thanks but no thanks." She pushed him away. For one instant she saw a frightened boy peer from the intellectual's eye slits. Cold, brittle glass replaced the gaze of the vulnerable boy. He had flat yellow eyes. The child's eyes were hooded by the ice eyes of the brilliant man.

Ada sat by the window in the usual green plastic arm chair. She was no longer the baby sister. She was Iris's mirror, as tall now, with the same oval face and brown eyes. Iris gazed into the eyes. She offered her a piece of the ripe Island mango she had brought her.

"You can eat this mango in the City but you can't find one on the Island any more. Fruit of colonialism." She placed the mango near Ada's nose, upon her lips. No salivation. No flicker of the retina. Ada's asymmetrical eyes remained dull and held blank emptiness where Iris had seen the eyes of others held a mirror or a depth.

Iris spoke to Ada of the block, the apartment, the revolution. She told her of the girl in Reader's Digest who woke up from a coma after seven years. She placed before her face and then on her lap prints of the photographs she'd taken last time showing the airshaft outside her window, the corner sink, and Ada on her chair, on the bed. She turned her sister's chair to face the sooty panes of the lone window. She longed to hold her sister. She pictured herself embracing her like a pieta painting. But when she placed her arms around Ada, she would not meld. Ada didn't stir. Still Iris came every Sunday and spoke to her silence. One year, one week, one day, one moment, her sister would speak again.

Iris walked, flanked by empty, burnt, gouged, crumbling, half-demolished apartment buildings and empty lot deserts filled with brick shards and trash. She looked behind and in front and snapped her shutter. She walked down the center of the barren, car less street. She reached the only building it could be, the only one still standing, a gray, wood frame house. She read the weathered hand painted sign, the letters almost graffiti. Hijos de Zion. Up close the grayness was bare wood, weather stripped, rain stained. A young man, almost a boy, let her in.

"Gloria a Dios," he said. He was bone thin, short haired, scrubbed like the building. The hallway, the house, the boy, were weathered bones. "Everyone is out. Praising the Lord. Begging."

Iris nodded. That was how she had first run into los Hijos de Zion. She had been selling REDENCION and two of the Hijos approached her with their begging bowls. "I had told Brother Jose I wanted to do a story for REDENCION about your work and he told me to come by." The boy stared at Iris and stepped aside. As she entered she felt terror. It passed and she forgot it. "May I interview you?"

He shook his head. He led her by the hand into the adjoining room which would have been the living room. He sat her and left her on a scrap wood bench, the closest to the door, one of many, lined up in rows to make this room a chapel. At the front end of the room was a low platform with a cross shaped lectern and behind it, against the wall, hung a scrap wood cross. It was like a Party storefront scrubbed to the bone. Instead of Marx, Engels and Mauricio Clauvell peering form their picture frames there was a saint pierced by arrows all over, bleeding.

When the boy returned he motioned to her go upstairs. "If you want to talk to this one you'd better go upstairs." She followed him up the wood staircase. The stripped wood showed faint tints of grays and greens from historic coats of paint. She passed rooms filled with rows of cots each one with a folded blanket.

They could kill me and stew me for their dinners for a month. She saw through a clean-scrubbed window at the end of the top floor hall, a back yard with two trees with bare branches, and beyond them the gouged buildings and the rubble dessert. If a woman is murdered and no one hears her scream, has the woman died?

The boy pointed to a man who knelt beside one of the cots, against the windowless wall and beside a narrow doorway deep in the room. He pointed to her camera. "No photographs." The frayed, faded strip of Indian cotton hanging from the door frame swayed. The Holy Spirit entered. The man uttered syllables that were not words. The boy led her to the kneeling man who seemed not to notice their presence. God forgive me was his prayer.

"Perdoname Dios mio, perdoname Dios mio, perdoname Dios mio, perdoname Dios mio."

The boy looked at Iris and she read bewilderment in the raised eyebrows, the small smile. She mirrored his expression and the boy's smile widened. How to write an interview conducted in mime? The man prayed so long that Iris understood the prayer was his answer to her questions. At last he turned around, still on his knees, and raised his face. "The Lord wants me to speak with you." He rose and motioned for Iris to sit on the cot beside him. She begged the boy with eye mime not to leave the room but he left.

"I've killed you," the man said. "I've come up behind you with a knife and stabbed you. Or come at you from the front with a gun and shot you. I will never be done asking God to forgive me and God will never be done forgiving me. I can't stop[ asking very long or the demon gets back into me. I can't leave any room for the demon. I gave everything up to the demon. My wife. My children. I was hungry. There were not enough drugs on this earth to fill me."

His testimony vibrated with each repetition. The light was good enough to make out his face. The features were chiseled, the skin tight, scarred, the eyes a pale, greenish brown. In the dim light from the window she could see the demon in them, staring through her and past her, at hell.

"I believe in divine grace." He turned away from Iris and knelt beside his bed facing his cross. "Perdoname Dios mio, Perdoname Dios mio, perdoname Dios mio.

The murmur of his endless prayer followed her all the way down the stairs to the front door. She didn't find the boy so she let herself out without saying goodbye or thanking him.

Iris was late. Rodolfo was well into his opening report. She walked down the aisle, squatted before the podium and took yet another photogaph of Rodolfo speaking. She turned and photographed the people who filled most of the folding chairs lined up in rows in the storefront, sat on top of the literature tables along the side walls, and stood in the front of the gated glass windows that were half blocked by stacks of back issues of REDENCION. She nodded greetings to the living and acknowledged the gaze of the martyrs peering from their frames on the walls.

"We live in momentous times." Rodolfo stood on the balls of his feet as the spoke, leaned forward, agitated his small fists. "The seesaw of history, its balancing fulcrum, is casting a huge arc: Remember Panama, but also remember Mandela."

She caught sight of Jorge just as he turned from his seat close to the front, to catch her eye. In France they'd invented a way of thinking that had left Marx behind. She let Rodolfo's words cleanse her of the blasphemy.

Inside the cocoon of her blanket Iris slowed her breathing. She had taught herself to breathe slowly, to float her gaze, to parade the moments of her life crossectioned inside glass.

She stands in the door frame, her hands clenched, her feet spread wide. She holds her shoulders stiff and stares straight ahead. Ada stands behind her, protected from Mama's wrath by Iris's body Iris takes all the blows. Iris knows how. She feels Ada's terror and fixes her gaze on Mama's breasts, rising as he raises her arm over her head, lowering as the arm comes down for the blow. She will not show pain. Iris stands inside this armor that gives her absolute power over mama. No blow can penetrate her. She takes herself in her mind to the green room. The empty green room. There, she towers over mama and it is Mama who must cringe. There she lifts her arm against mama and he hits her again, again, again. She watches the buttons of Mama's blouse go up and down each time she raises her arm for a blow. She feels nothing except Ada's terror.

Iris's bedroom is never fully dark until Mama turns the lights out in the living room, in the hallway, in the bathroom. Light makes a rectangle above the door where the air vent is kept partly open by layers of paint. Light makes a thin line under the door that widens like a fan as the floor slants.

Now the light has been gone for a long time. She holds her little sister Ada in her arms like in the pictures of Mary and Christ. She cradles Ada until the small body releases fear and melds into h her arms. She feels Ada's halting breath become her sleep breath. She lowers Ada gently onto her pillow, lies alongside her sister, and feels her sister's bird heart flutter against her own heart. She listens. Mama has stopped her frantic houseworking. She sleeps. Now it is safe to leave the green room.

This is the hour Iris waits for all day long. She knows the house sounds that usher in her time and she floats in the peade of Mama's absence.

She hears a creak and recognizes the sound of the window gate's accordion being pulled open. Iris must not have locked it after playing on the fire escape with Ada before Mama got home from her job as floor lady of a dress factory. She hears a scraping and recognizes the sound of the window being pushed up. She hears sneakered feet thud. She and Ada call Mama's window the turnstile because the junkies come in and out, in and out. She tiptoes down the hall to Mama's room. She stands in the darkness behind Mama's door and watches through the slit of the door. A young man holds one hand over Mama's mouth. Mama's arms flail. She scratches at his face. She elbows him in the belly. She's protecting the dresser drawer where she's got a full month's pay. Mama breaks free and punches the boy's ribs and chest. Iris sees terror on his face. The light from the street lamp glistens on the knife. She doesn't see when the knife went in, only when the boy pulls it out, only to plunge it again, into the middle of Mama's chest. He drops Mama, and then he pulls the knife out. He wipes it on Mama's flowered bed sheet. He walks right to the drawer, the middle one, where the money is. He steps onto the fire escape. She sees his legs climb up. It's true then, what Mama always says. The junkies come over the rooftops.

She hides inside the invisible armor and takes herself back to the green room. She doesn't see the changes of the light, the growing island of blood on Mama's sheet. She doesn't hear the telephone. She doesn't feel Ada clutch at her nightgown nor hear her go silent. She is still standing there when the police break down the door. She never learns how the police got there. She lets Dona Elsa, the neighbor, lead her and her sister out of the apartment and into her own kitchen.

Iris did not look up when Chus reported he'd obtained the weapon. She knew he had obtained it by borrowing it from her who was not supposed to have one, to still have one, but was supposed to have given up all personal weapons to the Party when she joined. She did not. She was sorry she'd given it up now. For years she'd kept the gun wrapped in Mama's bloody nightgown, unused, virgin. She didn't know how to use the bun well. Carlos and she had driven upstate for target practice. It had suited her to imagine herself a woman who knew how to use a firearm. The lover or Carlos the urban guerrilla had been given the honored job of obtaining weapon for them, Iris, Carlos, Papo, when they dubbed themselves Knight Rebels and took on what later she later learned in the Party was adventurism, barely a shade above street crime. How she'd bought the magnum was still her secret. Not even Ada had heard the story. She'd loved to imagine herself shooting. She'd hated to fire the gun. She could not make herself forget what the gun was for. She had been shocked by its size and weight and stunned by its recoil when she fired. The force lifted her hand straight up.

Chus, Millo and Jose pointed to places on the block by block diagram of the Barrios, just as Carlos and Papo had done on the blueprint of the Banco Isleno years ago. Iris feigned interest now, the way she had done then. She leaned forward, focused her eyes intensely on whatever target the men signaled, nodded her head, mimicked the excitation in the eyes of the men.

Why had the Party assigned her to this unit? Photographs and news articles were forbidden. Would they ever really carry out a military action (not adventurism)? She wondered what the thinkers in France might have to say. She was still planning murders in Marx' name.

She looked straight overhead at the sooty skylight much higher than a church dome. This abandoned warehouse Jose had procured for their unit must at some time have be used to store bacalao, because now, again, she got the sour fishy whiff.

Inside the cocoon of her blanket Iris forced her breathing to slow down. She willed herself to breathe. She tucked the blanket under her feet. "I am safe. I am safe. I am safe." I have drawn so many fears and I have made so many fears I will n ever be done fearing and fear will never be done making me fear. She saw the agate greenness of the demon man's eyes.

"I am safe. I am safe. Nothing can hurt me here."

She opened her eyes onto the darkness of her bedroom. She stared at the gated window, the lush avocado tree on her sill. Through the soot streaked panes she saw the fir escape. She stared until her gaze softened and the gray light mottled. Her two eyes became one. She was all eyeball, only eyeball and breath. She pulsed. She was energy encased in soft parchment. Her abdomen rose and fell.

She resorped to the stillness of the girl in the green room. Ada's stillness. She saw the whole of their stillborn lives in crossection, one life between them, each crossection one moment, each moment one crossection. The moments were flat, sheer, held in glass. Their essence was that stillness. This was not others' essences. Others' essences were engaged, quickened, serrated like gears, enmeshed. But not theirs. Theirs was still, impenetrable, unpenetrating.

I am safe here. Nothing can hurt me. I am safe here, repeated a thread of this quickened parchment that was her self.

Iris drove the green van. Most times she liked driving. Many Fridays when the regular driver was away she volunteered to drive the bundles of REDENCION to the Party committees. But this was not Friday. This was one in the morning on a Wednesday. The magnum lay on the seat beside her, loaded. Chus, Millo and Jose sat in the back of the van. She felt the force of their excitation. There had been air strikes on the Island. She was driving them all to the Armory. This was a retaliatory strike, the first time the Party in the City undertook a military action.

She pulled over on a side street alongside the stone armory building so like a child's drawing of a castle. Chus and Millo eased out the back of the van. She kept the motor running, her foot on the brake. She looked at her digital watch and counted the seconds while they executed their well-rehearsed placing of plastic explosives on the armory gate. She heard them close the van's back door 30 seconds under target. She drove. A small distance away Jose detonated the charge. She knew the explosion would be jut big enough to burst open the metal door and no stronger. Those three militants were veterans of the Island War, well trained by the City Force.

By dawn another Unit would have made the anonymous phone call to the media.

She dropped each man off in turn at the appropriate corner they had carefully determined on the big map of the Barrio. She took the van to the warehouse, put the magnum in her bag, and walked outside. She was picked up by another car two blocks away at the appointed second.

She was putting the key into her lock when she heard the first sirens. she knew that by then the armory would have been well looted. Gangs, revolutionaries, provocateurs and adventurers of the Barrio were now armed, even Carlos and Papo who had gone underground when she went into the Party.

She stood by her blind window with the gun in her hand and noticed for the first time she was trebling. She had been trembling. Her womb fell in her, as in a roller coaster, at the recollection of Carlos coming in her after an action. "I loved him." Her own voice in the empty room startled her.

Carlos had sent her with the magnum to the Banco Isleno. She had waited by the entrance where Carlos had shown her on the blueprint she must wait. She'd watched as Papo watched her from a pay phone on the street corner.

Carlos never came. She clutched the bag in her pocket with the note. Carlos never came. She watched the bank guard eye her, move toward her. Her gaze held the guard's for an instant. He was a young, thin Islander. In his eyes she read his recognition of her intention. she spun on her heel, walked outside past Papo inside the phone booth, not looking, turned the corner, and run home.

Carlos never came. He left her alone in the bank to do the action, hold the bag, take the rap. What saved her? What led her to walk out rabbit stunned as she was? He never came. "I loved him." But he never came. He never loved. She relearned this truth with the same sharp pain she experienced each time she relearned it. He never loved. the thing that looked like love, talked like love, fucked like love, had not been love. He went underground. She joined the Party. Even Ada had not heard this story.

She wrapped the magnum inside mama's nightgown and hid it once again deep in the highest shelf of the hall closet where she kept Mama's relics. She stood on the kitchen chair and went through the quilted satin jewel box, no longer pink, now brittle. She touched mismatched earrings missing stones, the orange coral necklace Mama liked to wear to church, Mama's watch and her wedding band. She read the dedication on the Bible the pastor of her Pentecostal church gave Mama when she professed her faith. El Senor todo lo puede. She held up the tortoise shell frame eyeglasses and looked through the big thick lenses. She kept the glasses because they looked like Mama's face.

Iris sat by the window in the green armchair that faced her sister's. Ada's gaze didn't register this intrusion into her visual field. Iris brought Ada a new yellow cotton blouse. She leaned to her sister, raised her arms, removed the white shirt. She saw her sister's virgin breasts encased in pointy white cotton. She slipped the arms into the blouse and buttoned it. She combed her sister's just cut hair. She stroked her sister's face and peered into the flatness behind her eyes. She longed to hold her but when she placed her arms around her, she wouldn't meld. She told Ada about the thinkers in France. She told her in a whisper about the violated armory. She told her about Carlos. She stared at her sister and after a while she sobbed.

Iris rearranged the clutter on her desk in the small back room of the REDENCION office. She stacked half-finished articles, file folders, back issues of REDENCION, clippings from the bourgeois press. This clutter was always in motion, never begun or ended. She pulled toward herself the wheeled cart with the computer she shared with Juancho whose hours she'd studied in order to avoid him. She sipped fresh early morning cafe con leche from the Island bakery on the corner. She set the cart so that she could look out the dirty window, or at the avocado on the sill, or at the window across the air shaft. She booted the computer and she wrote:

Please god forgive me, please God forgive me, Please God forgive me.' the man said his faith exorcised demons that had led him to commit one murder every day before he was saved.

Across the air shaft The Neighbor raised the blind. Iris had never seen her face, only her venetian blinds, her clear, clean window, her tidy dark wood desk, her computer terminal, her many-buttoned telephone, her coffee mug, and her back bent over the desk. Iris checked her watch. Ten o' five. As always The Neighbor was punctual. Iris imagined that through these exact morning repetitions she'd come to know The Neighbor well.

She returned to her story. She returned to staring at The Neighbor. She discovered under her telephone the pile of pink phone message slips Juancho had left her. Seven messages all from Jorge saying call him. Who was Jorge?

I cannot stop praying very long. The demons will get me.

She recognized his voice. Jorge was the man who'd brought the news from France. "You're persistent." She liked how he said her name. "A drink at seven at El Bohio?" He agreed.

"You can't take away somebody's drugs if you don't give them something else," is the philosophy of Reverendo Natanael Acosta, founder of Los Hijos de Zion. "Who would you rather your son, your brother, your husband, your neighbor, be addicted to, drugs or God?"

At Lucha Continua drug addicts are offered Marx.

She walked down the interminable aisle. She felt eyes upon her. The many faces on the many bodies on the many metal chairs turned toward her. Ahead she saw only the red satin banner hanging above the dais. The faces of the Leadership Commission members blurred. She approached. She arrived. Her hand was shaken by the Party Secretary. The armory action, although clandestine, had earned her this office.

Later at the dance after the Congress closed, dazzling yellow light was all Iris remembered of her induction and her first meeting of the Leadership Commission. Light was al she saw as she danced with Jorge. "I'm Jorge. Remember me?" He'd taken her hand and pulled her to the dance floor. "You made a date for drinks but you stood me up." He spun her and she let him. She let the fast music, all horns and percussion, fill her head. He didn't let her dance with anyone else. "Wait for me." He went for one last drink.

Through her sootblak bedroom window she saw the single yellow eyeball of the streetlamp. They didn't speak as he undressed her. There had been no kiss. He entered her from behind, standing. His entering burned. She stared at the single yellow eyeball of the street lamp. He gyrated her hips with his hands. She heard his silent finish at a tremendous distance.

Iris studied which fixed point held Ada's gaze. She drew her own green armchair toward her sister's. She told Ada Jorge had at last stopped leaving messages. She searched for a stirring in Ada's flat gaze. She read aloud from REDENCION.

"Please God forgive me, please God forgive me, please God forgive me."

Iris looked up at her sister's window. She took the front page of REDENCION with the black ARMORY LIBERATED headline, crumpled the sheet, and wet it at the corner sink. She rubbed the wet newspaper on the window. Soot and black ink teared on the glass. She wiped the blackness with the threadbare white towel, crumpled another sheet and rubbed the glass until it squeaked. She pulled the window open the few inches the side screws allowed, reached her arm around and scrubbed the outside as far as she could reach. From the corner of her eye Iris thought she saw Ada's gaze shift. Iris sat back in her green chair and studied the effect of her labor on the window. She'd cleaned a heart shaped section of the glass. Crumpled wet sheets of newspaper lay strewn on the floor. All that was left of REDENCION was the single centerfold sheet with her photographs of the barren street, the bone gray building. Iris read.

"I've killed you many times," the demon man said.

Ada laughed. Iris didn't register or recognize the rusty sound.

"I walked behind you and killed you from the back with a knife."

Ada laughed.

"I walked before you and killed you from the front with a gun."

Ada laughed.

This laughter resembled the laughter of the living. Iris was quiet and still Ada laughed.

She held her laughing sister like the pieta paintings, and felt Ada's body meld. She held her sister's gaze and in her eyes she saw herself. Ada laughed.

The Other Mother

On the other side walk, heading the other way toward the park, was the other mother. Sara pushed her own stroller straight ahead into its own shadow. She fixed her gaze straight ahead and downward. If Sara had no peripheral vision, secret Sara, lost in longing for the old Pepe who used to blur out "My love," while they made love, who once whispered right before he came, "I want to merge with you," she wouldn't have seen the other mother at all. Even as she looked away Sara noticed in great detail what the other mother was doing. Dana was in a dialogue of smiles and eye twinkles with her baby who sat in a pink sunbonnet in one of those strollers where the baby faced the mother and not the world.

Dana had lost all her pregnancy weight and her blondish hair was cut in flattering layers. She pictured Dana wearing a purple mohawk and a safety pin for an earring. The other mother used a diaper service and real diaper pins. Secret Sara whispered, 'As for myself, I aspire to becoming a woman unhinged. I long for the day when my child will be but one more accident of my existence and I run into him an one other free human being. O God, don't let the other mother see me.'

"Sara, Sara." Dana called, and waved as she pushed the stroller across the street. Sara stood inside a tree's patchy shade. Dana leaned into the shade to kiss Sara on the cheek. Sara gazed at the moving patches of shade on the cracked sidewalk and squirmed.
"You look great." Dana patted Sara's inch long black hair. Sara nodded. She could see Little Joey's green teething shit leaking from his paper diaper onto his blue stretchy. "Really terrific. You're losing weight! Is Joey sleeping through the night?" Dana looked at Joey, smiled and twinkled her eyes. "Funny, Lotty never gets diarrhea when she teethes. I never know she's teething until the tooth is out." She bent down to adjust the pink bonnet. "I've been meaning to call you. I'm trying to organize a child care co-op. Bringing Lotty to the office isn't working now that she's crawling."
Sara nodded. "I've got to run. I want to get home before Joey wakes up. He'll want to nurse the minute he opens his eyes. Call
me."

She pushed the baby away fast. The green fold up umbrella stroller clattered as it bounced over the tree roots that had broken up the side walk. Secret Sara took a deep, long breath. O gorgeous Spring. Behold the blooming green tips. This is the life! She lifted the stroller onto her h hip and climbed the stoop steps two at a time.

The darkness of the house engulfed her. She took in a deep breath of the musty, sweet, old paper scent of the living room. Joey opened his eyes. He screamed. She unstopped him from the stroller with her left hand, undid the front nap on her nursing bra with the right. "Quick, quick." She whispered into his ear. "Before you wake up your Father."

She lunged into the cane seat rocking chair. Joey found the nipple. He relaxed only slightly his muscular, wiry body against his Mother's bony arm. Mother and son locked in a sinewy embrace. She pictured Dana and Lotty in a puddle of symbiotic nursing bliss. Lotty, Dana had often pointed out, was very good at molding. High achievement at an early age!

Sara pictured a sunny rock in a stream, clear..no..cloudy and fecund. She took comfort in the muddy, moist life of the salamanders underneath the rock, was filled with the yellow light that filled the turtle sunning on the rock.

Joey tugged on the other breast. Sara moved the now superbly molded baby onto her other arm and eased his milk rimmed lips onto the full breast.

Sara ran her fingers through her short, nearly black hair. She missed the Princess Leah coils she used to make over each of her ears. Pepe was angry when she cut her hair but taking care of it was one more thing she didn't have time for. She hung huge filigree earrings from her ear lobes, considered lipstick, forgot about it when Joey cried. Up from sleep. Again. She held Joey clamped onto her nipple, with one arm. She glanced at the bed. Pepe was still asleep. Lucky he could sleep through almost anything because it wasn't pleasant when he woke up before he was ready. Life would be much easier if he didn't work nights.

With her free hand she dumped pampers, a change of clothes, some small bright plastic toys (small manipulables Dana called them), into the canvass bag with the stenciled signs for DIAPER and BOTTLE, Dana's small gift for Joey at the baby shower (along with the very same yellow booties Sara had given her for her oldest boy two years ago! Surprisingly Dana was organized enough to recycle a gift but not to keep track of where she first got it!). Dana had also chipped in with three others mothers from the Women's Center, for a complete set of those expensive baby toys, the ones with red plastic frames, colorful interchangeable hanging gadgets and enormous screws and bolts Sara managed to lose early in Joey's infancy.

She fought Secret Sara's urge to crawl into bed next to Pep and tuck Little Joey in between them. "My little husband," Secret Sara whispered to Little Joey. "Joey, my Little Husband, Pepe my Big Baby."

She hoped Pepe would be able to manage his dinner on his own. She put the banana shaped magnet on the note spelling out the whereabouts of the tofu, rice and red beans Pepe was not home in time to eat for dinner last night. In the old days when she still taught literacy four mornings a week at the Women's Center, before she'd become a full time Mother to everyone in the house, Pepe used to cook half the days of the week. That was before role correction surgery, Sara thought. She propped the back pack on the armchair, slid Joey feet first into it, and sat on the floor to ease her arms into each strap, and shift the pack onto her back.

Other mothers and a few enlightened fathers crowded Dana's living room. Most of them Sara knew by sight from the park, or knew better from the old days because they dropped in at the Center before Sara had fallen into the time warp of motherhood. She reached behind her, found one of Joey's hands inside the back pack and fondled it. It's fine, Secret Sara told him. It's not your fault.

One of the fathers rushed from his seat to help pull Joey from Sara's shoulders. As he pulled off the backpack he knocked off one of Sara's earrings. Everyone laughed, even Joey, who was crawling to the tangle of babies gathered on a rug in the center of the floor around a wealth of small manipulables.

"Now where did I read that children under two don't socialize?" Sara said and everyone laughed. Secret Sara was amazed by her witticism.

"Their mothers certainly can," said another mother who introduced herself as Meg and moved over on the couch to make room for Sara. The other mothers all laughed.

Dana pressed a cup of mint tea into Sara's hand and pointed to the honey pot on top of the book case. Books on every row were so tightly wedged no infant could dislodge one.

"I think just about everyone is here," Dana looked at each person as she spoke and everyone fell silent and gave her full attention. Sara studied Dana. "Let's start with self-introductions. Say your name and your baby's name." She was as self-assured here as she was running support groups for women at the Center. More than likely Dana didn't require fantasies of salamanders to get through her day, Secret Sara thought. Sara watched Joey crawling with the other babies. "A life of his own already!" Meg had volunteered to go first and now it was her turn. "Sara and Joey." Secret Sara shuddered at the sound of her own voice.

Dana asked whoever had ideas of how a child care co-op should run to speak. Soon enough Dana would get on to the business of telling them all what to do.

"Maddy and I concluded if we were going to have quality child care for Max we were going to have to do it ourselves. We're ready to go on this project." Brian, the one who knocked off Sara's earring, squeezed Maddy who was nestled alongside him, moldably plump in a green jumper with snap-on shoulder straps for quick access to the nursing breast.

"I'm interested in parental presence in the classroom. " Maddy added.
Meg leaned forward in her chair. "My baby-sitter watches the soaps all day and I'm afraid Katie's getting stupid."
"When I checked out infant centers one was arranged like a hospital ward and there was only one toy in sight," said Kathy.
Her husband Murray broke in. "One of those hexagonal things with a string you pull to get animal sounds. No way we're putting Laura in a place like that."
"It's a nightmare." Patty stood to speak. "I'm tired of telling Clark if we don't get some decent child care there's no way I'm going back to work. I'll stay with Pedro."
"Ellen and I are doing OK with role reversal," Roy said. "I've been home with Tania for six months. Ellen's a lawyer and she can make better money anyway." He grinned and Ellen stared straight at the floor.
Dana was looking straight at her so Sara said. "I'm an observer. I came because Dana asked me seven times." The others laughed. "I don't know what I want."
Dana nodded. "I see we have a lot of common concerns." She looked at each person in the room. "I've done a lot of thinking already so if it looks like I'm being pushy I want everyone to tell me so."

She produced a pad of graph paper with several budgets worked out: paying scale wages, hiring elderly people and high school kids, hiring illegal aliens, and then several combination.

"The hieroglyphs of my obsession." She flipped page after page of graph paper covered in tiny print.

'Clearly she's got a vision and will lead all of us to the promised land of a day care co-op,' Secret Sara thought.

Sara and Meg walked into the spring night together.

"You don't mind walking home alone?" Sara said. "It never used to bother me until I had Joey. I never thought much about my safety. I never used to care if I went home alone at two in the morning. I had my systems. I'd walk down the middle of the street. I had a special posture, very straight and shoulders squared, I thought would make muggers think I wasn't scared."

Meg looked down at the red haired top of Katie's head in the stroller and shook her head. "You mean all the burglaries? Criminals have their M.O.s you know. That's what my husband Tony says. He's a cop. He should know. A burglar's M.O. is not a mugger's is not a rapist's."

I didn't mean anything specific. I just meant fear of free-floating unidentified danger." Sara stopped. "Well. Here's my corner. Nice to meet you Meg."

As Sara walked down her block secret Sara thought of Hansel and Gretel. She pictured white, chunky bread crumbs. The sparrows and gulls would surely see to it that no child would ever be find the way back home. she walked quickly in the dim gray light that passed for night's darkness. Am I witch, stepmother, Hansel, Gretel or the Wood cutter? Secret Sara thought.

Pepe was sitting on the couch watching a cops and robbers who on TV. Sara pecked him on the cheek. He wore black pants and a black t-shirts and black basketball shoes. He'd even painted the soles black.

"You look hungry." Sara kneeled in front of him and he lifted Joey in the carrier off her back. Joey's joy at seeing his daddy squirmed through his whole body. Pepe lifted Joey up in the air and then sat his laughing baby on his lap. Big and Little gazed for a few seconds into each other's eyes.

"I made myself an omelet and left some on the stove for you."

Sara stood nearby until Pepe handed Little back. What bliss to have him in her own arms! She scooted to the bedroom, lay him on the dresser top that served as his changer, changed his diaper, bundled him into a faded blue sleeper from the Center's Baby Exchange. He looked endearing, edible. was there anything as beautiful as the human baby? she made him a throne of pillows in the middle of the conjugal bed. she dressed in one of the granny nightgowns she'd slit down the front. Secret Sara curled up with her Little Husband. Enmeshed in their nursing bond Sara and Joey drifted to sleep. Later when he came home from work Big might return Little to his crib.

The Other Mother had a fortress gate face with bars for teeth; an iron mouth. Red lips! Pepe walked stealthily on her roof; his black sneakers stuck on roof tar.

The pang of Sara's terror caught on the edge of Joey's wail. He groped for the nipple in the dark. The bed was moist with their sweat, a marsupial sack. In the night silence Sara heard the absence of Pepe's breath. Not home yet. She did not open her eyes.

Inside the kangaroo sack Secret Sara recalled with alarm the look on the Dana's face when she'd said at the meeting that she didn't know what she wanted to do about child care. How did the Other Mother always know the script, what came next in the story, what to do? In her half sleep Secret Sara saw the Other Mother's face slam her away like an iron-barred door. The Other Mother's self peered out through the eye holes in her face.

But not Meg. Meg felt like her best friend in grade school. Being with Meg had felt like being with her best friend in grade school. She shrugged. Who cared? Let them all switch me on or off, Secret Sara thought. My life is their soap and I am the heroine. She laughed.

Secret Sara lives square framed scenes.

The camera zooms on her asleep, wallowing between the puddly sheets, inhaling the pissy smell of her Little Husband.

Now a quick cut to the muddy stream: the mother salamander's infant curls against the wet maternal belly.

A sound.

A burglar enters the heroine's home?

What a lovely home! A lovely life! Suspense. But no. It is only the heroine's husband who works night reentering the grainy image on the screen with its dark French film shadows to confer weight, significance, reality.

The camera pans onto the ancient Chinese vase, the antique brass figurines of dancers, the electronic artifacts: six inch TV; so many toasters! The soundtrack, inexplicably, is jungle sounds. There is a wild beast screech.

The husband pushes in the door, removes his black gloves and black watch cap, surveys in the mirror the matte dark skin of his face. Off camera is the sound of a bathtub filling. Mother and infant stir.

The husband emerges from the bathroom in well worn white sweat pants and t-shirts. Close up of the tired, gaunt face. A grimace of pain. The audience, those peering perfect selves, intuit he's pulled a muscle or pinched a nerve. they watch the catlike motions of the gorgeous male who walks to the window, opens it, breaths deeply and fills his lungs with the night air.

Still facing the window he walks onto the straw mat by the conjugal bed. The nursing couple stirs.

The man salutes the sun (It can be seen rising through the slanted shutters of the East window.) He raises his arms, bends forward, steps his left foot back, arches, grazes his chest against the floor, rises again. His moves are smooth and slowly the jungle sounds fades into a cricket symphony.

The man lies in savasana for endless moments and then turns onto his belly. He arches his chest back into the cobra, raises his legs into the locust and turns for forward bends. He moves slowly. His breathing is smooth and continuous like the breath of tides and cells. He winds his legs and twists his long supple spine. He wedges elbows into thorax and balances into a perfect peacock. He places his head in the triangle of his arms, raises his legs and holds steady a perfect head stand. He stays there. For the viewers this is an endless wait.

Cut to the dining room downstairs. The camera pans the objects on the shelves: toasters, walkmans, tap decks a jade Buddha.

Cut to our hero, still in the headstand. Upside down his matte brown face is serene. Slowly, slowly, he descends. He winds his legs around his neck. He sits in a full lotus. He breathes. Day has broken. Stripes of light filter through the shutters and glaze with tiger stripes and prison bars our hero, our heroine, the infant and their lair.

Pepe lifted little Joey from between pink satin sheets. The diamond in his pink ring flashed. Sara squeezed shut her eyes and turned away from him. He smelled of patchouli oil. Sara heard the crib springs creak as Big placed Little in the crib. She felt the heat of Pepe's just bathed naked skin.

"Is this the mother who likes to fuck?" His whisper made Joey stir. "Shhh. You'll wake him." Pepe caressed the nipples of the milk heavy breasts. "This is the Mother who used to like to fuck." Sara caught his wrist. "My breasts hurt when you do that." He laughed. "Well, then, is this the Mother who likes to wrestle?" He pushed Sara on her back and pinned her arms flat." How I hate that throaty laugh, Secret Sara thought. Pepe felt between her legs and found her moist. How snug he was inside me before Little Joey. Now I barely feel him. Secret Sara crawled under the salamander rock. "You glow." Pepe spoke into her ear. "You flow." Hot sweat on satin. An ocean between her legs. He suckled mouthfuls of milk. The salamander burrowed into the soft mud and went to sleep.

Little Joey fed himself a mouthful of sand, caught Sara's eye and laughed.

"Just ignore him," Dana said. Secret Sara told her to fuck herself. You wouldn't ignore it if it was Lotty, she thought. Sara jumped up from the railroad tie bordering the sand lot, ran to Joey, rushed him to the water fountain. The shadows of tree leaves quivered on the sandy pavement.

"A bit of sand won't hurt him. He wants attention." Dana handed him a shovel. "We're making progress on the co-op. The space at the church may be certified and now I think Brian's brought the report from the hiring committee." Brian sat on the railroad tie just beyond Dana. "Look. Little Joey's eating sand." He reached down and took hold of Joey's hand. The baby raised his face up to him and laughed. "I didn't bring the report from the hiring committee." Dana fixed him with her supervisor glance. "Well then who's giving the report from the hiring committee?"

"I'm spacing out." Sara leaned closer to Meg who was watching Katie pour sand with a paper coffee cup.
"Maddy's got the report." Brian looked away from Dana and at the other mothers. "She's got it in her computer at work."

"Sara gave Katie a second paper cup. "I can barely stay awake." She pointed to the circles under her eyes. Meg gave her a worried smile. "Joey keeping you up?" Sara looked away. "Joey and his Dad. He works nights. That's why he never makes it to the meetings." Katie climbed up onto Meg's lap and patted her chest. "My husband works nights too." She raised her blouse and eased Katie onto the breast.

Maddy had arrived and sat perched on Brian's knee with her bare feet in the sand. She read the names of three teachers who'd responded to the notices on the Women's Center bulletin board. "Anybody who wants to can read the resumes." She waved papers in the air. "I need volunteers who can interview them next Monday afternoon." Roy, free because of his role reversal, said he was available and so was Patty because Clark volunteered to watch babies for anyone who was willing to interview.

And now Dana had to leave. She had another meeting at the Center. A few parents swarmed her as she left. Others collected babies and sneakers, shook sand off little feet, propped infants into strollers hung them in slings and carriers and propped them into backpacks.

"It's Sara's turn to host the meeting next." Dana marched off with Lotty in her mother facing stroller and two mothers on each side.

Sara nodded while Secret Sara shook her head. She pulled Joey's sandy fist from his mouth and eased him into the umbrella stroller. She walked quickly away before Meg was done wiping Katie's feet and strapping her into the stroller; before Meg could volunteer what her husband did at night and ask about Pepe.

Sara watched closely as the squared of chocolate melted into the butter in the cast iron frying pan. Behind her at the kitchen table Pepe ate an enormous mound of alfalfa sprouts and red lettuce with carrot dressing and another huge mound of rice and gandules.

She poured flour into a bowl, cracked an egg and stirred into the flour, poured sugar into the melted brown mess. She licked the spoon. "Brownies for the meeting."

Pepe looked up from his bowl and stopped chewing.

"We're having the baby co-op meeting here today. Maybe you can stay."

He rose and walked quickly and soundlessly into the dining room. He began putting toasters, tape decks and video recorders inside the drawers and behind the doors of the breakfront.

"I never thought you minded the mess." She poured the batter into the tin and set it in the middle of the oven rack.

Sara passed brownies around. It was simple, really. Was there any reason she and Pepe never had people over? We stew in our own juice. Secret Sara let out sigh. It's as if we were hiding out, had some secret.

"Look, Joey's got those jacks in his mouth." Dana bent down and pried a Tony from his hands. Joey looked up and laughed. Pepe walked on the silent balls of this stocking feet to his son, lifted him from the antique Persian rug, stuck his finger into Joey's mouth and took out the tape deck Tony. He lifted Joey into the air.

Sara offered Dana a brownie and watched her checking everything out. Dana shook her head. "What the hell. I feel rebellious." She took a brownie anyway.

"We're lucky to have the two fathers who haven't made it to our meetings here today. Dana pointed to Pepe and Tony. "Here they are at last, the guys who work nights." She beamed at the two men who sat at opposite ends of the dining table stretched to the fullness of its two extra panels. Tony nodded. Pepe rolled his eyes. Lithe, brown Pep sat hump shouldered, his head swallowed by his huge blue t shirt. Tony stared at him and at the empty shelves littered with Jacks and bits or wire, at the Chinese vase in the center of the table.

Dana spread sheets of graph paper on the table. "Here are the figures. One certified teacher, two grandmas, two high school girls."

Every one nodded.

"The space in the church fell through but Sara's offered the co-op the use of the ground floor here for the first six months just to we can get started.

Pepe glared at his wife. She smiled and offered him a brownie.

The babies slept on foam mats on the floor. In sleep, they crawled together and nested spoon like into each other: Lotty and Joey, Katie and Max, Laura, Tania and tiny Pedro. Sara and Meg hung Sara's laundry in the yard and watched the napping babies through the window.

The bright red cardinal swooped into the feeder. His brownish spouse swooped after him. Pigeons scratched their claws and wings on their metal feeding tray atop the fire escape of the high-rise beyond the back fence. The wind flapped the queen sized red satin sheets Sara had hung. the clothesline squeaked. Sara watched the shadows of the bird wings among the shadows of the sheets. Meg's face was half hidden by the shadows. She folded Sara's dry laundry on the picnic table.

"There's always some sign of a man's true character." Meg folded a huge black satin sheet. "You've got to be willing to see it and most of the time you'd rather not. You'd rather see what you want to see." Sara nodded and pinned one corner of a flapping crib sheet. "So you ended up marrying a cop." Meg stacked folded the pillow cases. "And that's after I said I'd never marry a guy who'd never be home." Meg folded T-shirts. "Tony never ate egg-yolks intact, only stirred up. If I gave him an egg that wasn't scrambled he broke into a cold sweat. Shouldn't that have told me something?" Still, I didn't see." She peered through the bars at the sleeping tangle of infants."

"Well, I picked Pepe because he ate health food and did yoga and took baths with drops of olive oil in the water for his skin and he seemed much better than my boyfriend just before him who couldn't stop drinking beers if he had one. He was sweet but crazy. Not just a recluse like Pepe. I mean crazy crazy. One night he told me he was late because he'd been secretly advising Fidel Castro on global strategy. Pepe seemed so down to earth. He took me for a hike in the woods. He turned over stones and showed me salamanders." Sara handed Meg another sheet to fold. "But would you believe that crazy as he was he could fuck? He was the ultimate master of the missionary. I'd always thought that was one sure fire way to tell about a man. I thought they just couldn't fake it. I went by whether or not they could make love. I mean think of the thousands of cues and messages and negotiations involved in good sex."

Meg shook her head. "Sometimes I get so tired of being somebody else's good luck."

One baby screamed. One of the grandmas, Sofia, rushed in from her lunch break. The other baby voices joined the chorus.

"That's why you tried the old way with Tony, marriage and all?" Sara wiped her hands and began walking toward the house. Meg nodded and sighed. "All that and then I discovered I was mostly alone anyway." She lifted the basket stacked with laundry, hefted it to the back screen door and walked inside.

Alone for a moment in the yard Sara stared at the flapping sheets. Pepe insisted sun dried laundry was healthier. One more sheet to hang and then she'd be off to the health food store to get Pepe the calcium magnesium he needed for his nerves. Why was he so on edge these days?

Secret Sara and Little Joey nestled in the marsupial bed. Joey suckled. She dreamed Pepe was a Mormon and she and Meg were his wives. While he was gone the night and slept by day she and Meg hung laundry together and cooked dinner. They talked in another language Sara the dreamer didn't understand. "That is the language of the perfect words," the dream voice said.

The absence of Pepe's sounds of return roused Sara at three in the morning. Joey slept flat on his back. Milk had dried and made a pattern of fine white webs around his lips. The shutters cast shadow stripes on him. "Tiny smiling jungle beast." She smiled and watched him breathe.

She remembered her dream and held her breath. Pepe walked stealthily on the Other Mother's roof. His feet stuck in tar. Another man came up behind him. Pepe let out a shrill rabbit scream. The other man was Tony.

Sara pulled Joey closer. She pulled up the satin sheet to her chin. She wrapped the down pillow around her ears. Secret Sara peered under the cool rock at the salamanders who'd fashioned pillows from wet mud and mosses. Their tiny hearts pounded.

In the moonless night Pepe's figure, dressed in black, vanished among shadows of water tanks, pigeon coops and roof sheds. He stumbled on a row of basil plants in cans. He went on, sure-footed, several feet forward, over the wall to the adjoining roof. The thud of Tony's huge body on the roof tar, the clank of the basil cans, echoed in the darkness. Pepe's eyes flashed like orange marbles. The two men locked gazes. Pepe's teeth flashed white. Tony leapt the low wall between the roofs. He lunged for a shadow. Pepe laughed behind him, close to the air shaft. Tony ran toward the laughter. He lunged again. Pepe ducked. Tony plunged over him into the air shaft. Pepe's hand missed the roof's edge. His own momentum swept him over into the free air. Their cries merged with each other's and with everyone's bad dreams.

Tell them I've given orders for another script, Secret Sara said inside Sara's head. Dana stared at Sara silent on the bed. She began to pull open the shutters but Sara shook her head. "Where's Meg." Joey wailed. Sara lay motionless. Dana hesitated by the window. Sara stared at the wall straight ahead. Dana picked up Joey from the crib and held him against her chest. His cry grew louder. She lay him beside Sara on the bed.

"Did you forget the funerals are today?" Dana sat on the foot of the bed. She'd brought over her good black dress for Sara to wear.

Secret Sara ran over the foolish scene again in her head: The two men chasing around on a roof in the night; Tony's lunge; Pepe's duck; Tony's plunge; Pepe's fall. Her sobs frightened Joey into greater wails. Mother and son keened together unaware that Dana was watching them from the foot of the bed, waiting, letting Sara have a bit more time to cry before she dressed her and got her to the funeral on time.

"It's always so nice when the children have gone to bed." Meg spooned honey into her tea and pushed the jar sticky with peanut butter smears across their kitchen table to Sara. Sara dipped the spoon and drizzled honey into her cup. She stared through the kitchen door at the trees lit by the full moon. Sara's satin sheets and Meg's flannel sheets flapped in the wind.

"Sometimes I miss Pepe so much it hurts my bones." Sara sipped her chamomile tea. Meg nodded. "I know what you mean. I can't bear to scramble eggs."

Sara rose to put away the honey jar in the cupboard above the sink. "And then other times it seems almost nothing has changed at all." Meg put her arm around Sara's shoulders. "Just another kind of absence."

Slip of the Tongue

Vince was slipping.

Through her living room window Violet watched the lavender snow.

"Vince is slipping, Mom. He's slipping fast." Her son Roy had said over the phone last night. Funny that she have heard the news from her son, her judgmental son. 'I thought you were a feminist mom. What are you doing taking up with a married man?" his words hurt. They resonated with her own nay-saying voices. She'd slapped Roy. Just about the only time she hit her son. He'd been all of 20. now at 32 he felt no shame at exploiting her relationship with Vince to advance as a corporate lawyer on the fast-track at Vince's firm.

The snow had thickened but still was not blowing. It fell like blurry rain.

There was nothing to do but keep going, the same way she had kept going after harry, good, old, selfish Harry had blown out his brains and gone off on his final sail in a closed casket. She pictured the casket dangling over the grave, floating on an invisible wave of air on that bright spring day. Why hadn't he just dropped everything he hated about his life (even her) and stuck with sailing. There were so many things one could do if nothing mattered enough to want to die. So many wonderful, meaningless things to do so much like dying.

Now it was Vince on his deathbed. She imagined him dying on h is marital bed. She imagined an enormous king sized bed so big Vince and Vivian never touched each other in her fantasies. She saw him lying, shriveled from the tumor in his brain that must by now have sucked up all the fat, what there was of it, a little bit around the middle, along the triceps, in the inside of the thighs. Vince had always been lean, long limbed and hard muscled from the youthful athletics when he and Harry had gone out for track together in college light years ago.

Violet put her legs on the red hassock and stretched them. She settled into the brocade armchair. Through the translucent lavender curtains she saw the purple snow begin to swirl. Wind now. The snow had fallen all day. She'd watched. One hand clutched the bright red crochet square she had not advanced by one stitch, the other rested on her lap only inches from the white telephone sitting on the table by the stack of leaflets for the demonstration outside Ridge Hospital.

STOP STERILIZATION ABUSE NOW. The black letters floated on the long, pink sheets of paper. She hadn't gotten around to dropping the leaflets off at the usual places, the library, the College, the Women's Center. She pictured a sparse picket of the stalwarts. The young mothers. Dana, Sara, Meg, Magdalena. the other phone clicked on. She heard her own voice answer, then a deep voice she didn't place at first. Dana. "I dropped two reams of paper at the Center. You'll have to call to schedule making copies of the fact sheet. Or get someone else to go in. Late evenings are the best time. Unless you raised the money to get it offset, then someone will have to get the paper over the FemPress. I'm wondering with the snow if we hadn't better call the picket off? Word's been out though, and people will be pissed if they show up and we don't. Better be consistent on a small scale. That's what you always say. Oh. Bring the networking sheets to the meeting."

Violet laughed. Dana could have all voices of a conversation by herself. She closed her eyes. This was one time she was not going to be redeemed by good, hard work. Those merciful, repetitive, endless, minuscule tasks had always delivered her to the next passage, reassured her of her own existence even when pain had blasataead her out of body. One month to the day after Harry's death she'd gone back to teaching High school English and taken on the organization of the local chapter of the Island Solidarity Committee. She'd called meetings in the Presbyterian church basement, visited the usual progressives, talked the pastor into joining. She'd made phone calls, lobbied, leafleted, defused angels on the heads of pins debates. Selflessly. Her self had been eaten away by grief.

The call about Vince would come if not this day then the next. She had been waiting for it for three weeks since the last time Vince had called when he was still well enough to call her himself.

The lavender snow sky turned to night's near gray darkness. The evergreen shrubs were weighted with thick snow shells. She entered the trance-like in between state, between one joy and the next, one connection and the next, one despair and the next, one miracle and the next. It was her ability to endure this state that had enabled her to survive. Yes. She had endured and survived Harry's death and now she would endure and survive Vince's.

The telephone rang. She raised the receiver to her ear. "This is Vivian. Someone wants to speak to you." In the pause she heard a distant, unintelligible conversation. She could barely recognize Vince's hello. She felt a shiver on the back of her neck where Vince would never kiss her again. "Vi come see me. It's fine by Viv."

"I'll get on the next plane."

She ran upstairs and tossed slacks, two sweaters, red yarn, needles, and the article she was writing comparing sterilization abuse patterns on the Island with that of Islanders in the City, into the overnight bag she'd had waiting on the armchair by her bedroom window since Roy's call. Vince had been sitting in that chair, his long arms stretching beyond the chair's arms, his legs crossed at the ankles on the bed the day maybe seven years ago when he told he he'd asked Vivian for a divorce.

"I said, Viv, I want a divorce." His gaze was fixed on the bird nest resting on the bookcase. "She just looked at me. She was wearing her mink stole. We were on our way to a benefit dinner for Legal Defense. She said, 'It's Vi, isn't it? That's it. That's all she said. She'd never mentioned it before and she's never mentioned it since. That was six months ago. We've never discussed it again."

Violet imagined Vivian in her mink stole looking at Vince put on his dinner jacket. She pictured them walking in silence to their car and then talking to all the right people at the dinner. Seven years ago. After that divorce and marriage became just a running joke for Vince and Vi.

The uniformed doorman announced Violet into the telephone and nodded. She walked the marbled, glassed in lobby to the shining chrome doors of the elevator. Through the glass she saw a fountain with a sculpture of a mermaid in a little garden. "Six, please." She smiled at the elevator man, a short, dark Islander. She studied this man who saw Vince nearly every day and knew all the ways Vince looked when he thought himself unobserved. This man had a greater intimacy with Vince than she herself did, who'd seen him for one weekend a month, for twelve years, mostly indoors, mostly naked.

Vivian opened the wide door and stepped back to let her in. Her long silver hair was pulled back. Despite what must have been six months of pain watching Vince get ready to die, her narrow, serene face still glowed. She looked steady and wise the way she had even in the college days when Vince first introduced her to Harry and Vi. A white uniformed nurse crossed the hallway behind them and entered what must be the room that held Vince.

Vivian took Violet's tiny suitcase. "Your room is this way. She led the way down a carpeted hall. "You'll probably need more than this. You can use my things. We're about the same size, I think."

Violet followed Vivian's high-heeled footsteps muffled by the thick pale blue carpet. "You expect me to stay?" Violet's voice echoed in the resonant silence. The apartment felt suspended in an inhalation.

"He wants you here." Vivian turned to Vi with a smile. "His dying wish." She opened the door and motioned Vi into a room with white laquered bookshelves and a big white laquered desk. Seh pointed to a wide pale blue velvet divan. "It makes quite a comfortable bed." She set the suitcase on pale blue velvet chair and drew the narrow slats of the pale blue blinds against the view of mirrored high-rise glowing shell pink in the rising sun.

"You must be tired. You traveled all night. Vince fell asleep about an hour ago. Why don't you rest and I'll wake you as soon as he wakes up." She opened the doors of a white cabinet above the divan and took white blue striped sheets and a matching down quilt. The two women made the bed together in silence. "I'll have Isa bring you a cup of chamomile tea."

Vivian pried open the slats of the blinds and studied the shell pink building. Beyond them were rooftops and high-rises. Vince and Viv had lived in this condo on the City for years, even after he became semi-retired. That only meant he did less paid legal work and more probono; spent less time in the office and more time on his political work.

She kicked off her high heels and wiggled her stockinged toes into the thick blue pile. She breathed deep. She picked up the faint odor of Vince's pipe tobacco. "His study." Living alone so many years she was used to talking to herself out loud. The room was nothing like what she'd imagined. This was the room he sat in when he called her. he touched the pale-blue push button phone, the one he called her from. She sat in the blue swivel chair on which he must have sat through those long phone-calls, first daily during the early obsessed stage of their love affair, then monthly to announce his visits, and then in the early days of his panic at his illness, nearly every day again.

Carefully, as if her sounds could penetrate the walls and break the held-breath silence of Vince's apartment, she opened the top drawer of her desk. She sat abruptly, felled by the recollection of Harry at his own study that last spring morning, the top of his head blown away, the leather chair drenched in blood already brown and caked by the time she found him when she got back from her antiwar coalition meeting. She had imagined Vince's study brown, leathery, manly in the unimaginative way she had made Harry's. After all these years she still revisited with the same, sharp terror that last moment of the living Harry, that is, the Harry she'd expected to find still living when she pushed open his study door. Long ago she had stopped hoping she might ever forget, stopped trying to predict when the memory and the pain would lash her.

She held her chest and rocked forward and back. This too would pass. It had happened once when Vince was with her, soon after Harry's death, in the early days of their affair when Vince had undertaken to take care of her, watch over her investments, see that widowhood didn't land her in the poorhouse and unable to finish ushering the nearly grown Roy into adulthood.

He had watched her bending over with pain and made no attempt to intervene, no attempt to console, no attempt to touch her, to alter what could not be altered, what would be forever part of her. Then, when he saw the pain subside he played an old Aretha Franklin record from their school days together and he danced with her without saying a word, kissing her while they danced, undressing her while they danced, caressing her while they danced. He had gotten them both naked and then gotten himself into her as they stood. He got inside her from behind and held her breasts and said nothing. That had been the solace and consolation and connection and closeness. It was enough. She'd known Vince such a long, long time! They had both just turned fifty as Harry would have if only he'd hung on to watch the tide rise again. It did, it always did. She remembered Vince full inside her, deep inside her, thrusting from behind as they both stood. "We're witness to the longevity of lust." He'd laughed. That laconic, lanky man, who would have suspected his passion? She would never cradle him in her legs again. The size of this thought was bigger than her mind. She closed her eyes and moaned softly.

In the top drawer there was nothing of interest. Maybe his interesting possessions were in the office he still kept in his old firm. Maybe he had none. There was a blank appointment book bound in brown, tooled leather, made in Brazil. There were several pens, ball-points, gold pens, a black Mont Blanc.

Violet answered a soft knock at the door and accepted from the Islander houseworker, must be Isa, a tray with a pot of chamomile tea, bread, butter and guava marmalade. Violet wiped her tears and thanked her. Did Isa know she was Vince's mistress? The Other Woman. His other significant other. Had Vivian during all those years of regular monthly abandonment by Vince, late at night, confided across class lines the secret she might not confide to her peers? Surely Vivian could afford a therapist for her confessional needs. She set the food on the desk untouched. She longed for her own bedroom, her own bed, her own window, for the barren tree now weighted with thick white clumps of lawn, the long lawn below it covered by a thickness of sepulchral snow.

Still fully dressed she stretched out on the divan beneath the blanket with the too crisp, too new cover. She closed her eyes onto the full blackness behind her eyelids that in seconds gave way to splotches of red and then the designs formed by her blood vessels that surely must be the origin of mandalas. She breathed slowly with her child birthing breath. So often in her life she'd had to birth her own next moment. She remembered the sting of Roy's head bursting from her. Life began and life ended. After Roy's birth this thought would pop up unbidden. She'd picture her own dead hand mummifying under the earth. Soon Vince would breathe out his last breath, expire. She saw a running reel of images of her acquaintance with dear, humorless Vince paling at the college bar beside Harry's boisterous, manic joking; wedding serene Vivian at the botanic garden; writing contracts at his glass topped desk in his City law office; blossoming as a workaholic, getting rich; revealing that first morning after their first night, when they made love long and slow this time on the bed she'd shared with Vince, how all his life he'd nursed a secret lust for her, his best friend's girl, then wife...Vince a breathless body, a rotting carcass dissolving...Ashes to ashes. Dust to dust.

She jumped up to answer a louder knock. Through the door Vivian said, "Vince wants to see you now." She opened Vince's door for Violet who stepped into the thick scent of disinfectant over a faint scent of human waste. "I'll leave you alone." Violet held Vivian's gaze for an instant. Vivian's cheek twitched; next instant her face was once again serene. She closed the door when she left and slowly, slowly Violet approached his bed.

People died in the winter, except Harry who couldn't endure another spring. Or did they die around the solstices? She made a quick mental survey of her deaths, and yes, yes they were always around the 20th of December, March, June...She could feel it now, as the winter solstice approached, the energy leaking out of the world, the universe even, feel the planet unable to carry its full load, spinning off the moribund to their deaths.

'Violet I love you and have loved you very much but I feel I can't go on...' It had been on a 20th of March she'd pasted Harry's good-bye note into her journal. The paper had browned around the clumsy, almost childish print.

Up close she heard Vince's soft moan, like an infant's coo. He faced away from her, toward the window with its blinds drawn against the morning light. His eyes were closed. A red poinsettia sat on the table by the window side of his bed. She studied his face, longer, impossibly thinner than the one she had last seen nearly six months ago.

"Hello sweetheart." She sat on Vivian's bedside chair, took his bony hand and sobbed. He barely stirred. His hand was cold. When he turned to face her, he opened his eyes and searched her face as if trying to place her. She saw the utter terror in his eyes and felt rage shudder through her, grip her throat and make it seize up.

"Vi, my love, doesn't look like we'll ever get married." He twisted his lips into a grimace she knew meant to be a smile. When she got to know him she discovered he wasn't humorless at all, only that Harry's big laughs had left no room. She laughed with him. "No need to get a sense of humor at this late date." She leaned to him and kissed him on the lips, on the cheeks, on the eyelids.

He tugged at her hand. "Lie down with me." She lay alongside him on the hospital bed. He smelled faintly of sweet pus and sour sweat. She nestled her head into his chest and propped his arm around herself and sobbed into his armpit. And what if Vivian, or Isa, or the nurse walked in?

"This stinks. I thought this time for sure I would go first. I'm sick of surviving and enduring, of knowing how to get up again the next day. Sick of it, Vince. Just fucking sick of it. How could you do this? How could you go and die on me like this? She felt his chest rising. He was trying to laugh.

Vivant sat at one end of the glass-topped dining table. Violet sat alongside her facing the wide picture window that gave onto rooftops and in between two tall buildings, a piece of river. They ate in silence the food IA had brought them, food for anorexics in their late fifties: skinless chicken, steamed broccoli, red lettuce salad dressed with lemon juice and sprinkled with some herb, maybe rosemary. Last night Violet dreamed she was roasting a leg of pork and glistening bright red sweet potatoes. In the dream she'd actually smelled the food. In waking life food didn't matter. She couldn't feel hunger.

She spoke to Vivant in her mind and imagined Vivant did the same. But their dialogue didn't spill over into their voices. Not yet. IA served them honeydew for dessert. Had Vine told Vivant this was VI's favorite fruit? She poured them decaffeinated cappuccino with nonfat milk. Violet sipped the hot milk. "Has he had a lot of pain?" Vivant looked up from her plate but didn't answer. Violet shook her head. "Of course he has." She felt herself begin to cry.

"I offered to have you, you know. He never asked." She stirred sweetener from a packet into her coffee. "All these years I'd known although he never said. I knew him so well it was hard for me to imagine that he could have room in his life for someone else. That there was another Vine with a whole other life."
"Did it ever threaten your life with your Vine?"
"At first. That first night I realized what it was he did when he was away. It was soon after Harry...after Harry. I'd dozed off watching some old movie. I always slept better when he was away, before you. I enjoyed a wholeness and privacy when he was gone, a sense of me. But in my dream I saw him making love to you. Standing. A goat like animal lovemaking like we never had together. I woke up with total intuition about everything. I vomited." She raised her eyes from her cup and looked straight on at Violet.
"I wanted him to leave you and marry me."
"Any woman would have thought she had to want that even if, like you, she really didn't."
"It didn't matter after a while."
"I said nothing when he got back. I raged inwardly thinking he was a hypocrite because there was no perceptible change. But then months went by and I saw that it was true. There was not change. What existed between him and you was separate, another reality. It had nothing to do with what existed between him and me. Sometimes I forgot all about it. Except every so often I remember hoping you would marry some other man. I'd remember that goat mating and know with you he was having the young man's passion he never had when he was young. It was as if in middle age he finally got rid of the embarrassment, the shyness that kept him from fucking like a goat when he was young and then got lucky enough to find a grown woman who'd let him."
"Fucking like a goat." Violet laughed.
"That's the first time I say fuck out loud. How do you like that? Fuck. Fuck.Fuck.Fuck. I'm having breakfast with the woman my husband fucks like a goat."
"Did you hate me?"
"I did and I didn't."
"He never spoke about you. Sometimes we'd talk about what it would be like when we got married."
"If I had gone first."
"It used to be a sort of running game, a joke I started because it helped me to laugh at the two of you. And yet, the effort of setting up an entire life with somebody was more than I could begin to imagine after Harry. I had suitors. But I didn't want that. I didn't want another marriage."

The nurse announced herself with a cough. Vivian introduced her as Carol, from the outpatient hospice. "He's calling for you." She looked at both women. They filed ahead of Carol and entered the room, first Viv who took possession of the chair and clasped his hand, then Vi who knelt by the poinsettia. "He wants you to take his hand," Vivian whispered. Vi saw her eyes were closed. Vivian could cry without moving any muscle of her face. Her tears squirted from the shut eyes. Violet took his hand.
"You have both been good to me." He fell silent. "I wanted to be a good man." The women studied the near stillness of his chest. He was unconsciousness, but he was breathing.

Violet crocheted the red yarn. She sat in the deep blue velvet armchair she imagined Vince sat in. Beside it on a small glass table his pipes hung from a rack, even the small white meerschaum relic from the 60s Vince used to smoke hash, the one he traveled with. Harry had given it to him. Vivian sat reading catalogues on the couch. Her knees touched the glass-topped coffee table with dark blue ceramic dolphins of many sizes.

"It helps me to observe Christmas. To shop like this. Gifts for Roy's children. They're Vince's grandchildren. You even gave him a child." She waved a catalogue from a City toy store.
"Roy and Rosemary didn't approve." Violet finished one red square and began to cast on another. "She had Roy tell me I was colluding in the oppression and the exploitation of another woman."
Vivian laughed. "The young people. They've reinvented Puritanism and don't know it. Roy knows you're here."
Violet set down her needle and yarn. "I should call them. Do you want tea?"

This was the kitchen Vince cooked in. She put the stainless steel kettle on the steel restaurant stove. It was only when they cooked together that she longed for domesticity with him, a fleeting longing, like the longing for Harry to come back to life. There was always something one longed for.

Last night she had fallen asleep at last, knowing Vivian was sitting with Vince, with Vincent. Knowing she might not be with him when he died. Exhaustion swallowed her. She dreamed herself on a bed of snow fighting sleep, fighting the frozen sleep that took her. But it became an almost joyful dream. She'd opened a door in Vince's apartment of glass and stainless steel and found another hallway. Behind the doors that gave onto it Violet found a room filled with infants, on the floor, on an enormous diaper table, in playpens. Fat, happy infants. She found a room with rocking arm chairs by a bright red fire, empty, waiting for her. She found Harry and Vince together in another room, drinking yellow beer from bottles, just returned from sailing, telling light bulb jokes. When she woke up she'd forgotten where she was. For a few seconds in her half-sleep she'd been the college girl that Harry pursued and Vince pined for in silence, full of possibility, so happy. The girl who had remained immortal for so long.

The kettle whistled. Vivian, she'd learned, liked honey in her tea. Her lone indulgence. She spooned a heaping spoonful of honey for Viv. Her own tea she doctored with Vince's Wild Turkey, something else he traveled with. She set the mugs on the tray and felt the carpet swallow her footsteps. Vivian had stretched out on the couch and lay there, eyes closed. She pointed to the glass coffee table. "Set the tea right here."

Violet sipped the hot bourbon flavored tea. She fingered the red wool square and gazed at her own reflection in the glass window. It was a strong, well loved, brown face. She should call Roy, but it wasn't easy to leave the land of the dying once she'd entered it. A land so rarefied she and Vivian seemed to have only each other to share its peculiar air.

"I knew about you and Vincent because once he made a slip of the tongue. Lapsus lingua. Amazing that he did it only once because our names are so similar, Vi, Viv. I knew he called you Vi the same way Harry did. He was helping me on with my stole. We were going to some benefit he didn't feel like going to and he'd forgotten his pipe. He sort of shoved the stole on my shoulders and ran back inside. We were by the elevator and he said, 'Hold on a minute, Vi, I've left my pipe behind.' I don't think he knew he said it. His back was to me. I don't think he noticed the way I sulked the whole night."

Violat took a long swallow of her tea. "Viv, Vi. I thought that similarity was very funny. I used to imagine running into you, or coming to see you, one of those movie wife and mistress scenes; a dramatic and cathartic and soapy moment that would have moved us all to the next thing. But I never did a thing. There was no next thing. Don't think I didn't think our scenario couldn't have unraveled many different ways. But there was some a stillness at the core."

Vivian sat up. "But indecision is a way of deciding. It really is."
Violat put away her afghan squares. "I think I'll go call Roy."

"It's Mom. I'm here. With Vince."
"With Vince and Vivian, you mean."
"With Vince and Vivian."
"Some scene. Ro and I keep meaning to come see Vince. You know how it is. How's he doing?"
"He's still among the living. He wants to be seen."
"It's not so easy with the twins. Ro doesn't feel comfortable leaving them with sitters, you know how it is.'
"Then bring them."
"I'm not sure it's a scene for children."
"Children can handle the truth better than you think. Some children, that is."
"Hey, Mom. It's rough for you, huh? Don't you want to get out, come down here, spend some time with the kids?"
"It's your place to come to me, Roy. I don't want to leave Vince."
"What have you gotten for all your devotion?"
She hung up. She waited by the telephone. She picked up on the first ring. "Ro and I and the boys will be there after dinner tomorrow. See you, OK? You know-how it is. I'll call back again and tell Viv."
"I'll tell Viv."

Violet and Vivian crossed in the hallway. Vivian stood outside her bedroom door, a room Violet hadn't yet been in. the conjugal room. Or had they had separate bedrooms even before the hospital bed?
"Roy and Ro and the boys will be here tomorrow?"
Vivian raised her eyebrows. "Tomorrow? To see Vincent?"
Their gazes held. They nodded. Both women doubted he would make it through the night.

Violet opened the shades to let the winter moonlight in. Vince stirred. In two days he'd grown thinner. His face was a skeleton now, his skin translucent. The look of complete terror would leave his face for long moments. It was gone now. She saw the slight tremor of his hand was a beckoning gesture and came closer. She could barely hear him ask for paper and pen. She found what he wanted in the drawer of the white lacquered night table. she raised the backrest of the bed, turned on the light and sat by him. From the corner of her eye she watched him labor to write. His will? A brief? A shopping list? A love poem? The effort exhausted him. He dropped the pen and slept again.

She heard the door push open and shoved paper and pen into the drawer.

Vivian approached the bed dressed in her pale blue robe, her long silver hair hung lose around her head.
"You look like an angel."
"An aged angel. Do you suppose angels age?"
They stood side by side smiling, watching Vince breathe.

"Vince wants everybody," Vivian said. She stood by the steps down to the living room and followed Rosemary's gaze to the boys. "He especially wants to see Hal and Vinnie, Ro. he's crazy about the twins. His beloved Thing One and Thing Two."
Violet had never seen Vivian beam. She knelt by the two boys. "Grandpa Vincent is very, very sick. You know that. he looks different. Like an old man in a fairy tale. But he's still your Grandpa Vince. Do you want to see him?"
Rosemary rushed to her children, knelt by them facing Vivian and put one arm around each boy. She looked at Roy. "You help me. It's not fair to ask five year olds to make a decision like this."
"Ro..."Roy spoke in a near whimper. "Everything, everything we have we owe to Vincent. we're teaching the boys fear."
The nurse entered and coughed. "He's calling you."
Vivian and Violet rose and followed the nurse into the Vince room. Roy picked up the boys and took them in. rosemary came in last. She held the door ajar with her body.
Vince was propped high on the hospital bed. His eyes were open. he looked better.
Hal, the plumper of the blonde twins, approached him with his arm outstretched. "I got a new transformer." He thrust the metal toy at Vince who dropped the boy on his lap. Vinnie followed h is brother and climbed onto the bed. "Tell us a story. Can you tell us one?"
Vince tried to laugh. "Vi, find that pad, all right? Read it for me." She took the pad in the drawer and quickly read the clumsy print to herself.
"Vince?"
"Read it."
She glanced at Roy by the window, Vivian in her chair, the boys at either side of Vince on the bed, and Rosemary leaning against the door frame. She read:
I dreamed myself young. I was young once.
Harry and I are sailing.
So then it's true we never really die? I say to Harry. Here we both are. He laughed and I laughed with him. Harry could always make me laugh.
This was Harry's answer: Four ourselves we never die. Death is for the living.
We had a good strong wind and a clear sky.
He said, 'I'm glad you took care of my wife.'
I told him, 'She took care of herself.'
And he said, 'So then it's true a man can love two women?'
Rosemary lunged into the room.
"Roy, stop your mother. Stop, her stop her." She covered her ears with her hands.
Violet kept on reading. Vivian watched.
"A strong wind rose and I woke myself up before the storm. I shouldn't have woken up. I should have gone sailing. I was angry when I looked around and remembered where I was. I want to write downthis dream. I want to write down this knowledge to leave it behind. I'm tired. I've forgotten."
"That's not a good kind of story, Grandpa." Hal jumped from the bed and ran tohis mother. Vinie followed.
"Vi, maybe you'd better stop for now," Vivian said.
"For Christ's sake," Roy bellowed. "What is this, psychodrama time? My father was a murderer, a self murderer but still a murderer. My Mother was used.."
"Shut up, "Vince bellowed.
"You're going to kill him," Violet screamed.
"Read on," Vince could barely speak.
"Do we have to accept this tyranny just because he's a dying man?" Ro said to Roy. He put his arm arondhis wife. They leaned together into the doorframe.
"The importantthing is to make room for itall," Violerta read on. "The important thing is to find the way n to avoid, not to close off. Intelligence is the true organ of love.."
She stopped. "That's it Vince, that's as far as you got."
"What about the sailing Grandpa? That's the good part." Hal came close to the foot of the bed.
"Yes, tell us a Grandpa harry sailing story. Tell us about Grandpa Harry sailing the Milky Way." Vinnie joined his brother.
Hal climbed on the bed and Vinnie followed. "Tell us the one with Grandpa Harry sailing to the land of the egg people, or to the land of the tricky grown-ups, or the land of the dinosaurs..."
"Give me a message for Grandpa Harry. I'm going sailing with him soon." Vince struggled to get one arm around each boy.
"Ask him what really happened to the dinosaurs." Vinnie nestled into his grandfather.
Vivian and Violet looked at each other, then at Vince.
"He's tired now." Viv gently eased the two boys down. She picked up Hal. Vi picked up Vinnie.
"Kiss your Grandpa,' Vi said. Each woman held one child on either side of the dying man. They kissed him.

"How could they do this?" Rosemary screamed at Roy. The two stood in the living room by the enormous window. Isa had set a tray with tea and cookies on the coffee table alongside the ceramic dolphins. Hal and Vinnie sat on the floor on opposite sides of the table eating the cookies in silence.
"Get a hold of yourself, Ro. You're scaring the boys."
Vivian had returned to the Vince room to settle him into aloneness.
Violet crocheted a new red square.
"How could you let her read that terrible thing in front of the boys. How could she read it?"
Roy stepped back. "She's right over there. Why don't you ask her yourself? The boys heard their own tale, Ro. Their story about sailing." He spun around to face his mother.
"What did you think you were doing, Mother?"
"Doing what Vince asked me to do."
"You mean what you're always doing."
She threw the crocheted square onto the carpet. "Let it go now, Roy. You've got to let it go. you don't have to be so angry. You don't have to judge my life. It's mine. Even my mistakes are mine. you can choose to let it go and just do it."
Violet drew a square in the air with her hands. "You're a prisoner of your own small thinking. You avoid, just as Vince said. You didn't kill Harry. You're not responsible for his or my choices."
She drew him toward her. "Step out of it. Break away. You can choose to."
Ro tugged Roy back toward herself. "You're advising him to approve of these arrangements? You want his approval? You people use each other to escape from your problems, to not confront them. You're advising him to get another woman on the side?" Ro was screaming. "Men have gotten away with this for centuries. Mistresses should have gone out when women's suffrage came in. We won't stop being oppressed by men until we stop colluding in their oppression."
Vivian stepped down into the living room and threw herself on the couch.
"Don't be a fool, Rosemary. There's a lot of room between one truth and the next and thank God for that. Vincent is sleeping."
She looked at Hal and Vinnie and the empty cookie plate.
"Hey, Thing One and Thing Two, shall we read the Cat in the Hat?"
The boys rushed onto her lap.
"Why should one man have two such women?" Roy drew Ro to him and let her sob against his chest.

Vivian shut the door behind Roy, Ro and the twins. She leaned against it. She pounded on it with her fist.
"Get out of my sight." She looked away from Violet who stood beside her, watching. "I don't want to see you. What are you doing here? Who do you think you re."
She ran into the living room. She grabbed one of the ceramic dolphins and threw it against the wall. She threw another and another until they had all been smashed, making a rain of glistening dark blue slivers on the carpet.
"You wanted to take my husband because yours was fool enough to blow out his brains. You fucked, fucked, fucked up your own life and wanted to steal mine. I hated you. I wished you would blow your brains out. I imagined you smashing your car in a snowdrift. I imagined you lost in the woods, freezing to death. I wished you wasting away from some terrible sickness."
Violet lunged at Vivian and slapped her hard across the face. "If you had any guts at all you would have left a man who loved another woman better. Who thought of another woman when he close his eyes beside you at night. Who didn't desire you."
"There's more to a marriage than desire. Desire has nothing to do with it."
Vivian lifted her hand, her fingers crisped into claws, her red nails shining. Violet stopped her before the claws reached her face. She pulled with both her hands on Vivian's hair. Vivian pushed Violet's shoulders. She fell, dragging Vivian down. They rolled, shoved, pushed, pulled, bit, screamed, until they were spent and lay panting beside each other.
"What did you want with him. You had a life. You had your job, your political work. You had your child. I had nothing. My work was to be Vincent's wife. I would imagine you arriving to teach your high school students English smelling of Vincent's sperm. O that terrible, goat fucking.
"I heard him slip into this study one night when he thought I was sleeping, to call you. I lifted the receiver in the bedroom.
"He was saying, 'I want you Vi. I want you. It fills me to think of you. It was an emptiness I didn't now I h ad. I want you.
"And you said to him, 'undo your belt, zip down your pants, those warm fingers are my fingers, I stroke you now, so softly you think its sea breeze. We're sailing, lying naked under a blue sky. There are no clouds, only hot breeze from my hand. I kiss your cock. I slip my tongue around it. You think it's the sun. You think it's the beginning of time. You think it's the big bang.
"Phone sex by an English teacher. I could hear him moaning, moaning, almost singing, moaning and laughing at the same time."
They held each other and lay in silence on the carpet.
Vivian sat up. "O my God. We've left him a long time."
They rushed into the Vince Room. He was lying very still in the gray glow of the moonlight. They studied him, then looked at each other. Vincent breathed.
Violet pulled a chair along the window side of the bed. Each woman sat beside him and took his hand.
"Sometimes I wish you would go and be done with your misery." Vivian bent down to kiss his hand.
Violet nodded. "I always imagined you and I alone at last when we were old. Funny the illusions I used to second guess the present."
He opened his eyes. He looked at Vivian. He looked at Violet. He looked straight ahead. "And now from nowhere, there's wind," he said. He didn't breathe again.

Violet awoke abruptly inside the blue dimness to the halting sound of her own shallow breathing. She swallowed and tasted bile in her mouth's dryness. "Now we are both widows." She curled up under the quilt. "Please God, deliver me to the next passage." She pictured herself drowning inside this lock of the canal, eyes fixed on the next rise.
There was a barely audible knock on the door. "I'm up," she called out. "Vivian came in with coffee on a tray. She was fully dressed in a navy blue suit, her gray hair pulled back and coiled on her neck, her face set into the serene rictus, and made up.

Vivian sat by the desk to watch Violet shed her flannel nightgown and step into the bathroom. She emerged naked and wet and Vivian watched her cover her tall, lean body with Vivian's panties, stockings, bra, slip and dark gray dress. "Thank god for Vincent's instructions." Violet said.
Viv nodded. "Just as well he wanted no wake, no funeral. We've been having his wake for weeks now. We can have a memorial for his friends but later, later."
"Only one more passage." Violet stepped out of the room and Vivian rose and followed her.

Vivian, Violet, Roy and Ro stood on the deck of the Pal Harry, Vincent's sail boat. The water was flat and gray beneath the shell pink gray sky. The boat rose and sunk lightly, like breath. Roy eased the boat into the slight breeze. They sailed. Vivian took a handful of the ashes and set it loose into the breeze. Violet clutched the ashes in a fist. She opened her fist upon the water.

Boxes stood lined up on both sides of Vivian and Vince's king-sized bed. Viv removed the last suit from its hanger and handed it to Vi who folded it carefully and rested it on the pile of suits inside one of the boxes. The radio was tuned onto the all news station, very low. They barely spoke.

Vivian moved to Vince's white lacquered dresser, opened the middle drawer and handed Violet a stack of shirts. Violet filled boxes with shirts, underwear, silk ties. They filled two boxes with Vince's huge Italian slip on shoes, his low boots.

"...at the tone 3:15, came from the radio.

"I want this finished before Roy comes at four to take you to the station. Before the truck from Goodwill comes at 4:30," Vivian said.

They went swiftly, withoutlooking into the high shelves of Vince's closet. Viv handed Vi his sweaters. "Maybe Roy wants them." Vivian set aside for Roy on the bed dress cardigans and pullovers, and bulky outdoor sweaters.

Violet glanced at the books. Vivian shook her head. "Unless you want any." She left untouched the row of books on his night table. "He wasn't done reading them, thinking with them. It's like throwing away what's left of his mind."

They sat on either side of the bed. Vivian opened Vince's tooled leather jewelry box, closed it. She sobbed soundlessly, tears squirting out of her eye. She opened the box again, reached into it then held her hand in a fist out to Vi. "Take this."
Violet reached her hand and Vivian opened her fist. She drooped onto VI's palm a glistening yellow orb with a bright blue stone that matched exactly one she had at home. Violet studied it for some seconds before understanding.
"Vince's college ring exactly like Harry's."
The women smiled and held each other's gaze.
"Where does the self go?" Vi whispered. Vivian looked away.
They could hear Roy's footsteps approaching, muffled by the carpet.

Fish in the Water

Rodolfo trimmed his black mustache with the small scissors he kept on top of the medicine cabinet where the kids couldn't grab them. His usual ritual before a big speech. Black hair rained on the crud Magdalena had let accumulate on the green sink. Rodolfo let them rain.

An image flashed through his mind, fleeting: the beach at night, shark teeth shining in the moonlight, burrowing in the sand. the long black sharks vibrated in electric breeze secret currents. He reached for the radio that hung on the peeling frame of the bathroom window. He turned up the sound.

"The Island Liberation Army occupied the approach to the town of Los Naguales on teh border with Ventura, according to the ILAs City Branch. Los Naguales' copper mines have been hotly contested by Official Forces and the ILA."

He brought his round face closer to the mirror and went on cutting.

"President Buffen denied rumors that additional official troops have been deployed to the border."

Rodolfo pictured a Rebel in fatigues crouched in ochre mud.

'Real revolutionaries,' he thought in the Rebel's voice. He felt the Boy's open-mouthed longing. He sucked the burning smoke of the cigarette he had propped on the edge of the sink dropping ashes into the bowl. In the Seducer's voice he thought of Iris's firm thighs, her tight skin, her sharp sweat. 'How to get he to shower before fucking?' The Seducer didn't like remembering Iris was off limits for the moment. 'The Leadership Commission had no authority over his personal life. How could Marieta throw socialist morals in his face at their last meeting. She'd pointed at him wit her red nailed index finger. 'Cut out the philandering. It is unseemly for a leader of your stature. You have to model the New Man.'

The leader's voice interrupted. 'The implication is that Iris resigned as a reporter for REDENCION because of the love affair.' Marieta's audacity! 'REDENCION needs a reporter more than the comrade needs a mistress.' He turned down the news of fires and hold-ups. He stretched his upper lip over the tiny, cigarette yellowed teeth, tilted his head back, clipped the last hair. He studied the line of h is mustache. 'Fine', thought the Seducer. Rodolfo combed his black curls with his pick. He placed the cigarette between his thick lips, sucked hard, and smiled at himself in the mirror as he threw the butt into the toilet.

The Leader thought, 'In tonight's speech hammer away at the victories, the most important thing is to challenge defeatism, and then agitate on holding the closing of the Congress of the City Branch in the Island's Liberated zone. What a victory that will be! 'Whatever you do, don't dwell on the bombing of the Branch office. Don't give the Venturan exile scums the satisfaction. Winning the battle for the mind was as important as winning the battle over Naguales.'

He opened the bathroom door onto Magdalena's screams. "Don 't turn on the TV until you're done eating." In Father voice he thought, 'She scolds the children too much.' The Husband thought, 'She's not well.' The Rebel scolded, 'It's your fault. You're machismo is responsible.' He stood in the doorway, his fists clenched, his gaze on the bookshelf made of planks held up by bricks, sagging with the weight of offset pamphlets, dog-eared books by Marx, Engels and Lenin, stacks of yellowed REDENCION, the black headlines of the issue on top blaring:

ILA ADVANCING
MEDICINE IN THE LIBERATED ZONE
ILA DEMANDS BUFFEN DECLARE POLITICAL AMNESTY

He studied Magdalena's silhouette framed by the doorway from the hall into the living room, and again by the doorway from the living room to the kitchen. He took a sharp breath and lit a cigarette. 'Her thighs are bursting her blue jeans,' thought the Seducer, 'She's not the slender Barrio Princess you stole.' His mind flashed an image of shark teeth, torn skin. He smoothed the pleats of the white linen guayabera Magdalena stayed up late to iron it last night.

From beyond the kitchen doorway she fixed on him the unseeing gaze of her slanted eyes. He approached her. The kids screamed from the living room. He stepped aside to let her run to their screams and reached for the place of rice and beans on the kitchen counter. He tossed his cigarette into the sink filled with pots and dishes, tore off a piece of the bread from the long thin loaf propped on a basket filled with yellow onions and green peppers.

Plate in hand he dove into the uproar in the living room. Roddy and Matty jumped up from where they lay on the floor fighting over the TV and grabbed his legs. Screaming, Papi, Papi, Papi Roddy reached him first.
"Sit down and let your Father eat." Magdalena knelt beside the TV with her hand on the switch. "Don't turn it off." Roddy clutched his Father's leg harder.

Rodolfo ate standing, staring at the screen. Beach, giant wave, slender surfer holding a can of soda. "that's what the Island's good for." Magdalena glanced at the screen. "They sell a lot of soda." He looked straight at this wife and tried to catch her gaze. "Remember the time you nearly drowned?" She fixed her blank eyes on his. "Remember Mama. on the Island. After we got caught in that big rainstorm. We were sleeping on the beach and we ran into that fish food restaurant. It was closed so we slept on the tables wrapped in dirty tablecloths."

He sat at the table and pushed aside the latest REDENCION to make room for his plate. ILA DENOUNCES BOMBING OF CITY BRANCH OFFICE. 'Ten days after the bombing the photo still makes you shake with terror.' The Rebel was always scolding. 'The last photograph Iris took for REDENCION before she resigned had been one of her best,' thought the Leader. 'And what a fucking bad time for this bomb. In the speech tonight make sure people come out agitated to go to the Congress and not shitting in their pants.'

Magdalena sat down on the arm of the sofa. "I remember the rainstorm." Their gazes held for an instant. The same memory filled them of love with laughter, in the rain, like fish in the water. 'We were so new then,' thought Rodolfo at once Rebel, Leader and Seducer. Had he forgotten how to hope? Magdalena rose to pry Roddy's hand from the TV controls. "It's Maddy's turn to pick the show." He frowned as his sister changed from this cops and robbers show to a cartoon about a dog. She steered Roddy to the sofa, sat him down and kissed his nose.

"The morning after the rainstorm you went into the water. It was a mirror. No waves." Rodolfo set down his fork. "We were Islanders from the City. We didn't know about undertows. I was watching you from the shore. You were screaming and a fisher man walking by on the shore was calling out to you to swim in a diagonal. I thought you were fooling around, until the fisherman walked into the water to pull you in." He saw the children had stopped watching TV to hear the story. Magdalena smiled. "You hypnotize them like you hypnotize the audiences at your speeches."

'She used to say your voice had charisma,' thought the Seducer. 'She called it my fresh ground coffee voice.' The Rebel again passed judgment. 'That was when you were still lovers and Magdalena cared even more about dreams of revolution than you did.'

She reached over and broke off a piece of his bread. "I can't remember nearly drowning on our honeymoon." He finished chewing a mouthful of rice and beans. "That was our honeymoon?" She nodded. "That's the only time we've gone to the Island together." Rode tossed a sneaker at Matty and flew over the table, over Rodolfo's food. The children screamed. Magdalena rose and grabbed for the collar of Roddy's t-shirt. She knelt to spank him.

Rodolfo rose. "How could you forget you nearly drowned?" He looked at his face in the mirror of the china cabinet, reflected among the clutter of dishes. He arranged his curls. He walked out the front door throwing kisses.
"The same way you forgot our honeymoon." Magdalena spoke to his back as it disappeared into the darkness of the hallway. "Don't you have time for your coffee?" But Rodolfo had vanished at a run down the stairs. She stood by his plate and finished the rice, the beans, the bread.

Across from the Venice Rodolfo stopped to study the row of identical eight story buildings all named after cities in Italy. "Magdalena's damn nagging to move to the Venice and for what?, "thought the Leader. 'Better for the kids. The same junkies everywhere. At least before we lived right by the Branch office.' The Seducer interrupted. "The way things are going it's to your advantage. Will Iris turn up tonight? Has she come to any functions since she resigned?' He nodded a greeting to Lalo, a middle aged Islander who caressed his car with one chamois wrapped hand, held a beer can with the other. 'A true revolutionary moves among the masses like a fish in the water was one of Marieta's favorite precepts from Mao. Did he really even like the masses? What could be less interesting than making love to your car on the street?" The Leader despaired.

He walked quickly past Papo, Victor and Chino. 'Damn tecatos.' Thought the Rebel. 'When would the time come to send junkies and drug dealers to the firing squad like they did in Ventura after the Revolution?' As usual they listened to their boom box and waited to make sales. No matter how hard Magdalena tried to run away from them they turned up, colonizing like the Empire, like roaches.' He ignored their calls of "Hola, mi Pana." Victor called after him, "Not selling newspapers today?"

He rushed to the corner where the calm of the street gave way to the agitation of stores and fruit stands of the avenue. 'You'll kill them if they ever come near your kids,' the Rebel decreed. 'Lumpen'. thought the Rebel. 'Marxism had named them well. When he left the street to become a Pentecostal preacher he'd hated having to forgive them. This was how Marxism had surpassed Christianity. There was no need to turn the other cheek. Che had said a revolutionary loves. I say a revolutionary hates.'

He ran down the subway stairs. His heels echoed in the piss stinking tunnel. He ran for the train, sank into the cold steel seat. He traveled against the evening home going traffic in an empty car.

He closed his eyes on the graffiti of Papo and Flaco. Someone had scrawled VIVA A FREE SOCIALIST ISLAND over COMMUNISTS OUT OF VENTURA. One small victory in the ideological war. He breathed deeply and went over his speech the way Reverendo Isaac had taught him to do with his sermons.
The columns that framed the porch of his Grandfather's house on the Island: summary of recent victories on the Border. The stairs of cracked Moorish tiles: the first Congress of the City Branch ever to be held in the Free Zone. The dark hallway hung with family portraits: summary of the current military situation. Abuela's room: summary of the political situation. The goatyard: links between the struggle on the Island and the fight for democratic rights in the City, housing, schooling; don't forget arson at the Naples.

The Boy dreams himself in a crowd of men dressed in fatigues and camouflage. The crowd is dense. He hears a percussion of clocks, congas, heartbeats, shots and hell shrieks. The boy seeks the good man with Rodolfo's face. He opens a door. Runs after him. He looks for the face. Runs after him. He looks for the face in mirrors. He woke up at his stop and ran out before the train doors closed.

He'd timed his arrival well. He could see across the street from the train exit the crowd already gathered outside the public school Marieta had rented for the rally. By the newsstand Rodolfo sighted her, with Celso and Domingo, huddled on the steps of the school in their continuous informal meeting of the Leadership Commission. 'This is the best of the cheap meeting places.' The Leader had to admit there was no way of ever getting rid of that pain in the ass Marieta in the face of such efficiency. 'With my speeches and her administrative gift the organization will go far.' He studied the headlines of the commercial press. Without looking he saw the row of vaginas like hairy flowers on the covers of magazines. 'Ay Iris.' The Seducer was silenced by the Rebel. 'Just get over that sexual addiction.'

The Leader found the headlines he sought. GOVERNOR DENIES ILA OCCUPATION OF NAGUALES. CADETES DEL RETORNO TAKE CREDIT FOR BOMBING.

He approached the crowd studying the face. 'Knowing the individual is not the same as knowing the group.' had been one of Reverendo Isaac's maxims. 'The group is a different animal, a prehistoric one,' thought the Seducer. He remembered how Reverendo Isaac moved his congregations to tears and howling and drew from them those senseless syllables, that speaking in tongues he claimed was the Holy Spirit but Rodolfo later discovered it was simply power. 'It's your job to move that power,' thought the Leader.

He dove into the human labyrinth that now spilled into the street. 'It is possible to move all these people to act in concert.' the Leader went on. 'What if you fail? What if you don't measure up to the task?' The Rebel was afraid. A young man with a long, share face, one of the security guys who would attach himself to Rodolfo like a leech, lit his cigarette. He smiled and shook hands. The Rebel went on with his judgments. 'Some speakers like Secretary General Echegaray don't need tricks. Even Reverendo Isaac. But you are a cracked bell.'

The Boy's images of black cassocks dragging mud and reeking sweat flooded Rodolfo. Nigh; fire; sweet smoke; sweet cloying flesh. The Boy dreamed himself but was he cannibal or missionary? Three young women militants Rodolfo didn't yet know sold REDENCION on the edge of the crowd not far from where Celso, Marieta and Domingo stood talking. 'The land of the blind where you are the one-eyed man,' thought the Rebel. 'No one is a prophe in his own land,' thought the Leader.
"Working hard?" He addressed the prettiest of the three REDENCION sellers. He spoke with the fresh ground coffee voice of the Seducer. "It's not the speeches that make revolutions," he said. ('And you are only good for speeches,' the Rebel scolded.') "Selling REDENCION does, daily, painstaking work does." The dark one parted her slender lips and smiled to show small white teeth and the pink tip of her tongue. "Companero, isn't it dangerous to hold the closing of our Congress in the Free Zone?" He saw Marieta signaling to him from the stairs. 'Here comes another scolding.' The Seducer smiled at the girl. "When there is war, there is always danger," he said as he walked away to join the others from the Leadership Commission.

"Magdalena home with the k ids?" Celso said and patted him on the back. Marieta nodded. "We've got child care here. She could have come." She brought her head close to his and talked into his ear as they walked up the steps. "The mobilization lists for the Congress don't look good." He saw the dark shadows under her big eyes. She was probably up all night supervising the printing of the program and the banner painting for this rally. "The mobilization tonight is weak. It's obvious the local committees haven't been meeting their quotas of home visits. We've underestimated the impact of the bombing of our offices. I'm calling an extraordinary session of the Commission after the rally. Don't make faces. There's no choice."

She read from the tiny notebook where she listed her tasks and everyone else's. "In the speech tonight you have to bring up the dues. If tonight's fund pitch is no good we're not going to cover the office rent, let alone the repairs from the bombing." He nodded. Security had opened the doors and they joined the line of people entering the school hallway, slowed at the door by the meticulous search of purses, knapsacks and briefcases.

Stuck at the door the crowd milled. Rodolfo greeted militants and sympathizers as if he blessed them, mimicking Reverendo Isaac. After most seats of the auditorium were filled the Leadership Commission walked inside followed by its security team. They marched together down the aisle of the dusty school auditorium nodding at the crowd and smiling. For Violeta of the Island Solidarity Organization he had along gaze to the eyes. She was sunk into the wooden chair and her knees were pressed onto the seat in front of her. Her yellow eyes returned his signal. 'Beneath that designer denim dress she is completely naked,' thought the Seducer. He walked on. Marieta was watching.

The leaders climbed onto the illuminated stage lined with luminous banner of red and green satin.
ALL OUT TO THE CONGRESS
INDEPENDENCE NOW
THE FUTURE IS NOW

The men sat at the green and red satin covered table. Marieta poured glasses of water. Through his cigarette smoke Rodolfo saw a sparse audience, at least a third of the auditorium empty. Militants on security duty wearing read and green armbands were lined up along the walls of the room. Only Iris and her camera were missing. The murmur of voices rose and fell like breath.

Marieta stood behind the podium covered in red and green, coughed, and sipped water. She laughed softly and the crowd laughed with her. 'It's amazing how she reaches them, 'The Rebel thought. 'Fish in the water. Feet on the ground.'

"Hot in here, isn't it?" She laughed and they laughed with her. "A small sacrifice for the struggle. Others sacrifice more." Her voice dropped and resounded, her face glowed: Marieta possessed by her mission. "The successful culmination of our Congress campaign is no more and no less than building our revolution as the Island Liberation Army makes our revolution, as we make our revolution day by day wherever we are, we are the heroic Island people who have survived and triumphed in the face of centuries of colonialism..."

As she spoke the Leader traversed the porch columns of his Grandfather's house, the stairs with the cracked Moorish tiles, the hallway with the dark portraits, the rooms, the goatyard...

She enumerated the least the greatest colonial abuses. Rodolfo saw the faces of the audience reflecting the luminous expression of Marieta's firm, serious face. He allowed himself to be raised by anger; anger against the empire; redeeming anger. After all, Reverend Isaac's devil had turned out to be a bunch of rich people with an army. Anger and his mission redeemed him of the discordant multitude of his voices, of his indifference of his adultery.

They were still chanting INDEPENDENCE NOW when Rodolfo reached the podium. He adjusted the microphone and saw through the glare of the lights the glowing faces of the audience. He had not finished saying, "Compares," when the bomb went off. The sound of the bomb reached him after the screams that came from every corner of the room. he heard wood creak, metal crash and smelled a sharp, acrid scent.

"I Shiite on the mothers of the Cadetes del Retorno and all Venturan exiles, doing the Empire's work for them." He heard his voice blare over the speakers, the sound system still intact. He felt himself taken by the hand; found himself in a car. Violet's familiar bony hand offered him a lit cigarette. 'Survival above socialist morals.' The Rebel approved. Celso himself had shoved him into Violet's green Volkswagen.

"Leave Rodolfo," Iris said. She took a deep drink from the beer can she had resting on the stoop of the Venice. She put he arm around Magdalena who sat beside her with her eyes fixed on Roddy and Matty. Iris released Magdalena and focused her camera on the children's race upstreet.

"Women's liberation won't keep me company when it's three in the morning and I'm all alone in bed," Magdalena said. She sipped beer from the glass she'd brought downstairs.
"You're alone at night anyway." Iris set the camera on her lap.
Roddy screamed. He'd fallen forward on his face. Magdalena ran to pick him up and hold him until he was done crying. Iris followed, focused, shot the squatting Mother, the crying boy.
Back on the stoop of the Venice they drank and smoked in silence in the muggy early summer night.
"Soon it'll be time to fight the kids to bed." Magdalena looked up. "I'm sick of the sky that n ever turns dark." Iris took her hand. "In the Island the night sky is black." Magdalena turned to face her friend. "I keep dreaming of sharks. I dream they chase me. I go into a sea without waves and suddenly night falls and the sharks in the black waters rub against me, cold and rough. I dream I know if I swim in a diagonal I will be saved, but I can't"

Iris opened another beer can. Magdalena drained he glass. Roddy appeared with his pants torn at the knee, his knee, bleeding, screeching.
Magdalena pulled at her long black curls. "Give me a break," she said.
Iris picked up Roddy. "Sana, sana, culito de rana," she sing-songed. "Now your Titi Iris will take you to bed." She sat Roddy on her hip, took Matty by the hand and walked the children upstairs.

Alone on the stoop Magdalena felt a chill, hunger. She drank. she smoked cigarettes one after another. At last Iris' military heels clicked liberation.

"They're both asleep. They were wiped out from all the running."
Magdalena rested her head on Iris' shoulder. "Last night I dreamed the sharks chased me as far as the shore." Iris stroked he hair. "You won't believe this but the sharks started giving me those licking kisses dogs give."
"While I was singing, 'duermete mi nino' I got a revelation." Iris took Magdalena's hands. Her slanting eyes everyone said resembled Magdalena's, shone; she fought laughter. "I thought, let's go to the Island right now. If we hurry we can catch the rooster flight." Magdalena jumped up. "You can't be serious." She strode indoors. "You are serious. But where would se stay? What money?"
"How many times haven't you spent the rent money on one of Rodolfo's organizing trips? Let's do it. You're eaten up by rage. One of these days the kids are going to pay."
"Where have you seen a woman who wasn't bursting with rage?"
they walked arm in arm up the hallway labyrinth, laughing.

"To hell with the cigarette buts in the sink." Magdalena threw two pots on top of the dishes and pots already spilling onto the counter. She pushed past the forever open ironing board in the hallway by the bathroom door. "To hell with the white guayaberas." She the bathroom door. "To hell with the mustache trimmings in the sink." She grabbed an armful of clean laundry hanging on the wooden drier above the bathtub. Iris climbed on a chair to reach on the high closet shelf for the suitcase Rodolfo used on his political trips. Magdalena tossed the clean laundry into the suitcase.

"I see convenience prevails over socialist morality." Violet sank deep into the carved foam rubber chair covered in a velvety corduroy the color of blood. Her knees were folded and her dusty bare feet were planted on the chair. 'Not even the children would do that at your house.' The Leader made Rodolfo squirm and sip cognac faster than he wanted to. From where he sat in an identical chair facing Violet he could see her thin soft thighs and the darkness of the curly hairs in her center so unlike the lighter curls on her head. He had been sitting in the enveloping chair for an hour engulfed by a light summer blanket Violet had wrapped around him. 'As if you were in shock,' thought the Rebel. He sipped cognac and let her light another cigarette for him. Flutes and violins from the disc of nueva cancion music from the Island she was playing for him put him in mind of rainstorms.

And now she rose, played a disc of boleros by Maya, the island suicide with the hoarse voice, and sunk beside Rodolfo into the foam chair. He kissed her hard, quickly. Fish without air. He made galloping, deep thrusting, biting love to her.

They'd made love man times but he had never before seen her porous skin of a nearly blue whiteness. the blue skin glowed against the red brown of her hair. Nor had he ever noticed the unexpected roundness of her shoulders, the clarity of her yellow eyes, the softness of her lips and that her song was sweet, as if it were emanating nectar not spit. He closed his eyes and saw waves sparkle, then the mirror sea, then the adolescent thighs of Magdalena rising in and out of the flat water guided by the fisherman who kept her from drowning. May's hoarse, breaking, smoky voice engulfed him.

The Boy dreams black night. Thick adobe walls. Smells wet ground. Salamanders scurry between his toes. He dreams himself a Taino youth. His manhood is being tested. With the others he climbs the cemetery wall. Together, they must bury the war dead. This work is only for virgins. The touch of a youth who's not a virgin will make the dead warriors bleed into the mud.

The elders watching don't say so, but it is known because the dream has a past and a memory, that this work will make men of the virgins.

After the burial, at dawn ( the dream has a future) the elders will take the new men to the won.

They will be warriors.

The Boy dreams he is impure, no virgin. He slides down the wall to the wet ground. He hears the rapid drumming of his terror. To touch the bodies and make them bleed is to reveal to all that he is already not a child. Not to touch the bodies, to run, means he will never be a man. No longer a child. Never a man.

As usual, Violet dropped him off in her green bug a few blocks from the Venice. He walked slowly up his block naked of humans, populated only by garbage cans spewing beer bottles, paper diapers, cellophane.

He climbed the Venice stairs. An image filled him: Magdalena's taffy skin as she loved him inside wet clothes on the restaurant table after the big rain. 'It rained and rained and we were fish.' the rebel felt the image cleansing him. He saw the glistening shark teeth, felt the coarse shark skin. He felt a hot pain on his chest and on his thigh. Only now as he approached Magdalena did he begin to feel the blows from the bombing. Moaning, holding onto the greasy hallway wall, he dragged himself the last steps to his door.

"Ay Mama, ay Mama." He struggled with the key and at last pushed open the door. "Ay Mama, they got me this time. This time they really got me." He dove into the chloacal small of diapers, cooked beans, coffee grounds. He reached his bedroom door and leaned into the frame.

Empty bed. Empty crib. Empty cot.

He lit a cigarette and filled his lungs.

"This can't surprise you." He welcomed the Rebel's judgment. He found he note stuck to the refrigerator door by a magnet shaped like a dolphin.
I can't take it. I've gone to the Island with iris. I've taken the rent money. I'll write. Forgive me.
'She's signed with the same M in a circle she puts on notes telling me where she's left my dinner.' If he could the Rebel would smack him against the wall. Rodolfo pounded his head with his fists. With one swipe of his arm he crashed the clutter on the counter to the floor. He took a deep swallow of rum from the bottle Magdalena kept for him on the refrigerator, sucked the last of the cigarette, tossed the butt into the sink, dragged himself back to the bedroom, and threw himself on the bed.

He dropped his head into the pillow that smelled of jasmine and sharp sweat, like Magdalena and sank into a dead man's sleep.

The Boy dreams himself a rodent amid the rotting beams and dusty gray plaster that he gnaws at, that over him in the dust they shed as he gnaws. He dreams himself all alone. When they leave it always hurts; it hurts each time; and they are always leaving. He dreams himself in the pine oil scent of his grandmother's kitchen where the vapors of pine oil, coffee, scorched milk and beans have woven into the fibers of the sooty curtains that swing, swing, swing on the breeze of lead and petroleum and the distant vibrations of cars and trains.

He dreams himself seated at the table of wood brown formica writing in the black marble notebook.

The TV is on loud: cowboys and Indians shooting.

A light bulb hangs over the table from the ceiling and casts a yellow-red ring.

Out of the corner of his eye the Boy looks at the Christ on the wall. is the red heart pulsing, beating, spitting blood?

he turns the TV louder and the sounds of the mice race, of their gnawing, are gone. The walls expand and shrink with the breath of their creatures.

Bang, bang, shots, blows, kicks, take that, take that. He likes this. Take more.

In the notebook he adds the numbers in the row that slants. The big numbers get smaller toward the edges of the page; he erases and erases. The page is torn.

They Boy climbs on the chair, reaches for the box on top of the refrigerator, bites at the donuts covered in sugar crystals one after another. He gnaws at the sugar crystals stuck to the cardboard box.

He returns to the table and fixes his gaze on the screen. He dives inside it. Into the glowing green, the luminous gases, the wings of fern, the fog, the shrieking of the apes. His hands are roots.

The telephone woke him. The morning sunlight filtered thorough the slit between the shade and the window frame.

"She's dead." Celso's piercing voice, sharper than usual, made Rodolfo sit upright on the bed. He saw Magdalena floating face down on the mirror sea. 'You killed her." The Rebel would kill Rodolfo if he could. 'The Devil doesn't play games. Reverendo Isaac's voice promised compassion, but not yet. 'The Devil's price is high.'

Celso was sobbing. "Marieta's wounds weren't serious enough to kill her." He couldn't go on.
"Marieta?" Rodolfo's voice couldn't disguise his relief.
"They let her bleed to death in the emergency room. They killed her twice. We can't let them get away with this. You've got to get over here." Celso slammed the phone.

Rodolfo didn't waste time with a shower. He changed into the last clean shirt on the ironing board; brushed his teeth; smoothed his pants.

He grabbed the papers at the corner newsstand.
EXPLOSION BREAKS UP ILA RALLY
CADETES CLAIM RESPONSIBILITY

He read as he walked. He raced into the train. As he read on, the Leader ordered the agenda of the Leadership Commission meeting. With a tremor of excitement the Leader formulated his proposal. 'We will dedicate the Congress to Marieta, now that she's a martyr.'

The Woman Who Married Her Own Son

Magdalena biked almost to the end of her graveled street to spy on the sunset pink house of The Woman. She looked through the wrought iron bars and the jungle of vines around the porch. She wished her own house was sunset pink, although hers was magenta and that was next best. She studied this house to see what gave it a separate sense. She and the little girls called it the house of The Woman who Married Her own Son.

"In the Reparto Playa Nueva all the houses are the same except for the color and the secrets". Her dog Lasi looked at her with yellow eyes, and smiled her dog smile. Magdalena smiled back and when Lasi jumped up she kissed her back. Lasi, with the face of a shepherd and a collie's white chest, fluffy tail and floppy ears, was the best surprise Papi ever brought back from a preaching trip. He couldn't wait to wake her up when he got home in the middle of the night from an evangelism campaign in The Interior. He handed her the tiny zippered bag. In the darkness she'd smelled the salty puppy smell.

Lasi was a better surprise than all the costumed dolls the little girls loved; better than all the ceramic roosters and frog whistles and painted dishes Mami was always grabbing off the wall and smashing on the floor. Even so, she wished Papi never went away. One time when they first moved to Reparto Playa Nueva, before the little girls had moved in, Papi had come back a day early. Magdalena was sitting on the edge of the front lawn, playing with a nice clay she'd discovered in a puddle after a big rain. She kneaded the fine wet dirt and was forming the letters of her name on the driveway. Missing Papi made him appear. But only that one time. She sensed a presence, Lasi jumped up from her slumber, and there he was, happy to see Magdalena. He'd squatted beside her, kissed her on the top of the head, and shaken his head side to side with admiration. "Look at that. Your name." Everybody was supposed to have a person that was all theirs and Papi was hers.

"What will Papi bring us when he gets back next week?" Lasi turned her head to one side and fixed her gaze on Magdalena who got herself still and gazed back. If she paid attention she would learn to speak dog the way she saw babies learn to talk, by just being around people who talked. Now that school had been out for months she had her chance to learn to talk dog by spending night and day with Lasi. The dog brought her chest to the ground and raised her butt. This meant it was time to bike away. As she pedaled her mind filled with the mystery of The Woman.

Magdalena got the story from Cristinita before the schools closed two months ago and Cristina went all day long to teach old fishermen from Playa Vieja how to read. Cristina was allowed to do anything she wanted and her Mother was happy to see her when she came home. When The Revolution closed the schools so that students could teach analfabetos Cristina's mother let her go. Magdalena begged and pleaded but her own Papi said, "Nunca. I'd rather see you dead." Late that night when they were fighting she heard Papi tell Mami the Revolution had used the church. "They got us to teach them how to do literacy and then told us there would only be one literacy campaign allowed, theirs." Mami smashed the best of the turtle clay whistles. "Don't you care that at last millions are finally learning to read? Who's making you turn against our revolution? Who's la Otra this time? Who's the Diantre? Tell me, who is she?"

Cristina got The Woman's Story from Mayra, her older sister, who was allowed to do anything she wanted. Of course she had joined the Milicia, and now she got to go all over Playa Nueva and Playa Vieja and knew the story of every house. Mami wanted more than anything in the world to be a Miliciana, but Magdalena heard Papi tell her late one night in his preacher voice, "If you join, there's no more marriage." Mami had thrown the big red clay rooster and screamed, "What marriage, you're never home. I do everything. Go to my job. Keep the house. Raise the girl. Pay the bills. Buy the house. I'm married to myself. You should have been a priest instead. You don't have time for a family."

Magdalena came to the paved portion of the street close to the avenue, whistled, and Laci took off running. She biked as hard as she could letting her mind fill with images of The Woman's wedding. Lasi sped ahead. She won every race and waited for Magdalena at the avenue. Cristina said Mayra showed her El Suceso with the headline WOMAN MARRIES HER OWN SON right on the cover. Mayra had seen the wedding with her own eyes. They'd all stood right in the living room of the Sunset Pink house with the house door wide open.

The wedding couldn't wait because the woman was pregnant although she barely showed. The disgraced priest who did the ceremony wore a blood red guayabera. Magdalena pictured him in the middle of the living room, empty of guests who didn't come. What incantations did he recite to The Woman facing him, beside her husband to be, her own son? The bride wasn't very tall and wore red high heels and a too tight black dress and a small black veil, just a hat. The tall thin brown son with a big jaw and big elbows and big knees wore a black suit. Behind the couple stood the woman's father who was taller than everyone, and dark, with blue white hair and a black moustache, like her Papi. Mayra told Cristina The Woman's mother, round-faced, hair dyed jet black, had cried and cried.

Only two months later, Dona Francisca, the midwife from Playa Vieja, had been called late at night for the birth.The baby had hooves and a tail and tiny horns.Mayra said the baby was born dead. Francisca wrapped it in the sheets it was birthed on, and right then, at one in the morning, she raced with the bundle to the river.It was a moonless night, but as she set off there was a sudden flood of stars. This starlight was from angelwings. God, Mayra said, didn't leave the devil all the room. It had been enough light to walk the pebbled street to where it gave way to dirt, and then maneuver without cracking an ankle the potholes carved into the dirt by tires during the rains, and enough light to get all the way downhill to the Rojo river. Dona Francisca tossed the devil's baby into the eye, where the river spins into itself. She flung the bundle and just as it was about to hit the spinning eye a hand shot out of the water and grabbed the devil's child.

Magdalena caught up to Lasi at the avenue separating the Reparto Playa Nueva from the old fishing town of Playa Vieja and stopped to let the traffic by. "What did the devil do with his baby?" Lasi tilted her head.

As they crossed the central island of the avenue the dog barked at the young militia women on their break from their training. Cristina's older sister Mayra waved to Magdalena from where she stood in the middle of a group of young women. "Ven aca." When Magdalena stopped her bike Lasi jumped up, Mayra kneed her off and pointed to the sky. "A Contra just flew away. Maybe that's his plane. He stole it right here, across the road, from the Rebel Air Force Base. He may bomb us so we're being mobilized." Magdalena balanced on one pedal, ready to push off. She took one last close look at the way Mayra had taken in the waist of the men's olive green pants to show her tiny waist and told Lasi, "I can't wait until I'm old enough for the Milicia."

She sped past the Milicianas, made it to the other side of the avenue, and turned onto the narrow street to the center of Playa Vieja where tiny wooden houses had been built long before the Reparto Playa Nueva was even a thought. She found the blue house. She studied it. The deep front garden had become a meadow. She slowed down, then stopped. Lasi plunged into the mass of tall wild grasses. Magdalena watched the bees work their way from the pink to the yellow to the white clumps of tiny flowers. The air over the wild garden swarmed with tiny bugs.

Only last week she had glimpsed the gray haired old man through the side window. Last month she had seen the long-haired, brown young woman standing at her porch gate. She and the little girls called her The Girl, short for The Girl who Married her Own Father. The Girl held the old man's baby right at the front door and was making Juan the viandero show her lots of yucas and malangas and fronds of cilantro, just like any other housewife might have done, as if marrying your own father (and Mayra told Cristina this girl had) happened every day. But today the house was closed. Maybe both The Woman and The Girl had joined the militia her Father wouldn't let her Mother join. Or was today some kind of devil unholy day, and all of them were at a secret ritual? Back on the corner, the milicianas were lining up, ready to go back to their drills. She stopped, held Lasi's collar, and watched for cars.

She saw Cristinita break away from her sister Mayra and bike toward her. She waited until Cristina pedaled up beside her. "I kissed Chucho." Magdalena looked away. "How is kissing Chucho news?" One afternoon last week after she and Chucho got home from alfabetizacion Cristina made Magdalena stand in Chucho's kitchen looking out for his Mother while they necked on the back porch. Through the window right over the sink she'd had to watch Cristina and Chucho lying down on the porch floor, kissing for minutes at a stretch just like in American movies. Cristina leaned closer. "Yes, but I kissed him and I felt his thing." She brought her lips to Magdalena's ear. "Last night Mayra told me that when a man kisses you, or sometimes even when a man thinks about kissing you, his thing gets big and hard. She told me because I was asking her, exactly what do they mean in the novelas when a girl loses her honor? She told me that's when you aren't married and the man puts his hard thing inside you anyway. Like The Woman and her Son!" She pedaled off, back to her fishermen.

Magdalena stood motionless letting the cars go by, holding on hard to Lasi's collar, thrilled by this new horror Cristina had revealed. Hadn't she seen this phenomenon just yesterday when Chucho stopped his bike to tell Cristina his Mother had just left their house? Yes. She'd seen the bulge in his shorts. Could such a thing have happened to her own Bebito, Chucho's cousin, her almost novio, when he talked to her? And now that Bebito had moved away from Playa Nueva back to the Capital, could it be happening to him with some new girl he'd met in his new barrio?

She biked back to the Reparto along the street behind her house until Mami's screams reached her on the afternoon breeze blowing in from the sea. She could tell Mami came home angry from her job as secretary to the Argentinians installing microondas at the Rebel Air Force and then got angrier because even though Magdalena had nothing at all to do all day she was late again for her cafe con leche afternoon merienda. She didn't want Mami's milk with the scum on top but she pedaled home as fast as she could, swerving to avoid the deep holes in the dirt stretch of the road. She could already see the graveled street that had been waiting for the entire three years her family had lived here (ever since Mami talked the contractor into a bargain for being the first buyer, and pulled together the down payment by not paying bills for three months) for the concrete and asphalt the contractors had promised in their sales pitch.

Senora Alvarez, the contractor's very big wife, stood at the doorway of the their shack just before the gravel started. "Magdalena, so good to see you!." It was easy to see she was always happy to see her. She waved Magdalena over, bent down to offer her cheek for a kiss, then kissed Lasi's snout. Mami was calling, screaming, but Magdalena leaned her bicycle against the Alvarez' shack. She'd get a better merienda here. She couldn't take her eyes away from the woman's hugeness. Alvarez, the creator of the Reparto Playa Nueva, stood at his tall work table looking at his enormous blueprints, eating Chocolatina cookies, the best merienda there was. He was big too. How did he look just like his wife except with a thin, brown moustache? Maybe Mayra would know if the Senora was the sister who married her own brother? Maybe they had no children because their babies were born dead with hooves and tails. Alvarez' pale green guayabera stuck to his back, sweaty despite the fan constantly turning, and despite the shaded coolness of their shack built under the one old tree his bulldozers had not yet ripped up.

Senora Alvarez poured Magdalena a glass of sweet tamarindo drink from her big thermos. She took from her husband's table the box of Chocolatinas in their colored tinfoil wraps, and handed it to Magdalena. She'd never held an entire box. Senora Alvarez didn't care if Magdalena ate them all. She took a handful. "More, take more." She took another green one, unwrapped the shining foil, and slowly nibbled off the outside layer of chocolate and then bit into the thin crisp cookie.

Senora Alvarez didn't have a little girl but she had a pair of shepherd dogs.She was saying her female was not well, and maybe she was pregnant.Did Magdalena want a puppy? She gave Lasi pieces of white cheese she brought from home for her. Magdalena unwrapped an orange Chocolatina, licked and chewed.Senora Alvarez said her mangos would soon be ripe. They were just like bizcochuelos.She would bring her some. She bent toward Magdalena and studied her face."If you don't take care you will be getting pimples. A girl your age has to start washing her face with rice water. I'll bring you some from home. Holy remedy." Magdalena nodded.

The big woman drew closer. "You must be very careful. There are older women who like to get too close to little girls." Suddenly, Magdalena clearly heard her mother's screams, now very angry, rising over the fan's whir, and over the groaning of the concrete mixer behind the shack. She drank down the tamarindo, unwrapped the red cookie, the last, put the whole thing in her mouth and put the shiny papers into her shorts' pocket.

She lunged the bike onto the hard, packed mud of the dirt path and sped away. She turned around to call for Lasi who lagged behind because Senora Alvarez was still feeding her white cheese. Her front wheel hit a rock inside a pothole, swerved. As she fell face forward her chin hit the pedal. The big woman ran toward her but Magdalena was gone, gone. With Lasi right behind her she pedaled as fast as she could past the identical Alvarez houses, each with its own brilliant coat of paint: fuschia, lizard green, blue, sunset pink. She reached her own magenta house, the very first in the row, the very first the Alvarez' had sold, the only one still without an iron gate around the porch. She ran inside. She had one instant of comfort in the scented cool shade of the mariposa vine. She caught sight of her mother waiting at the door and for one instant she could tell Mami meant to love her, but she just couldn't figure out how.

Magdalena approached with Lasi at her heel, went inside, watched her mother slam shut the door. Pieces of green ceramic were scattered on the brown and white floor tiles. She braced her feet and clenched her fists and never once looked up while her mother hit her full force with her open hand on the ass then gripped her with both hands on the shoulders and dug in her nails. She called her Diantre. Diantre was her Mother's way to not say diablo because saying devil was a sin. How could it be that to Mami Magdalena was a poweful force to be vanquished? Diantre was what Mami called "La Otra" she accused Papi of having. When she was done Magdalena walked slowly to her bedroom with Lasi at her side. She saw in her dresser mirror that when she had fallen the bike pedals had made two little cuts under her chin. Two trickles of bright red blood still flowed from the little wounds. "My secret tears." Lasi tilted her head and moaned.

She followed Lasi under the bed and curled herself around her dog. "She hates me because she knows Papi loves me more than he loves her." Lasi made a tiny whine. "I know. Who would love her?" Magdalena stared at the mesh of wire that held up her new mattress Mami had bagained down and bought. For one moment she noticed the ache on her ass and on her shoulders,then she forgot. A tear began to well. It stopped. A scream began to rise, but didn't.She clutched Lasi hard. Just then she heard little fists pound on the glass panes of her window. Her little girls! Magdalena rolled from under the bed. She stopped in the bathroom and scrubbed off the dry blood on her chin and neck. She ran to the living room door and let in the three little girls.

Small dark Gloria with her short curly hair took Magdalena's hand. "Wait till you see what I have." Tall blonde Silvia with agua de violeta scented braids skipped ahead. Plump brown haired Miriam with her boy's haircut ran both hands up and down Lasi's rump. When Magdalena went to the Evangelical Campamento in the interior and Lasi refused to eat what Dona Francisca fed her, it had been Miriam who got Lasi to eat. The girls trooped ahead into the bedroom, past the table with the tiles Magdalena found in the Alvarez' dump and painted herself, each with it's own fairy tale scene, to the doll cabinet Magdalena painted right over the termite sores using leftover sunset pink paint Senora Alvarez gave her when she asked. She took the Indian boy doll and sat down on the tiles by the bed.

Gloria pulled out from the pocket of her shorts folded up pages she'd torn from the last El Suceso. "Read this." Magdalena took the papers. Whatever the little girls asked of her was important. She could show grownups, especially Mami, just how children should be treated. She was glad to be the only big girl who liked playing with the little ones. The pictures from El Suceso printed in brown ink showed a man with a huge belly, and then a monster dead infant with a beard. "They say he ate his own brother in his mother's belly before he was born." Magdalena read on. "And then he was pregnant with him his whole life." They looked at each other and held back laughter. She pointed to the monster baby photo. "And then they cut the creature out of him." She turned the page over. "And then the man died." The little girls laughed, pretended to cry, laughed more.

Gloria knelt by the sunset pink cabinet, studied the many dolls Magdalena's Papi brought her from his evangelism travels, and took everybody's favorite, the tall, white haired princess doll. She put the doll's clockwork heart to her ear then kissed the doll."Hola Princesa."

Silvia took the second best blonde ballerina.

Miriam waved her Indian, the only boy doll, who was the Prince.

Magdalena took the cellophane nurse doll given to her on one of her rounds by Francisca, the curandera and devil's baby midwife from Playa Vieja. She held back the urge to squeeze the tiny Fairy Godmother flat.. Why had the old woman given her the doll? Why was she afraid to play with any other? If Papi really made them go North, she'd have to take this ugly doll.

The little girls looked up at Magdalena and sat in a circle on the cool floor tiles. Lasi stretched beside them with her head on her paws. Magdalena sat in their midst like their queen, or their comandante, because right then, although not one of them bothered to look, the militia was marching past the house.

She handed the girls the colored tinfoil Chocolatina wrappers.

"Mira, mira, mira." Gloria grabbed the red one to drape around her Princesa then waltzed her to the center of the ballroom. "My Papi said this morning that he saw shooting in the Capital." She stood the Princesa close to Miriam's boy doll.

Miriam made the Prince a crown with the green foil. "Today a contra took off in a plane from the airport right across our road."

Yesterday the girls had argued, and today it was Silvia's ballerina's turn to be discovered as the real Cinderella by Miriam's Prince. She made golden Chocolatina slippers for the ballerina and moved her toward the Prince. "I wish they wouldn't fight any more."

"May I have this dance." Miriam spoke in the deep voice that turned the Indian boy doll into the Prince. Magdalena considered telling the little girls the phenomenon that happened to men when they saw a woman they liked. She decided to keep the secret. A good mother protected her daughters. Magdalena danced the Fairy Godmother along to protect the ballerina. Gloria set down her doll and pushed Silvita's hand until the ballerina doll's face touched the Indian boy's. "Cristina kisses my cousin Chucho with her tongue inside his mouth, I saw it." She held the doll's faces together for a long doll kiss.

After the kiss was done Gloria set down her doll. "Take us to the river." Magdalena could hear her Mother making corn meal with brown sugar, their usual supper when Papi wasn't home and she didn't have to make carne con papas. The secret to being good to children was to remember to almost always say yes, like Senora Alvarez.

Walking softly so her Mother in the kitchen didn't hear, Magdalena walked out the front door with the girls. There were still two good long hours before a silent dinner without Papi. The four girls bicycled with Magdalena at the lead, and Lasi trailing after them, down to the Rojo river. They hid their bikes in the bushes and walked to the flat wide rock. From that spot they could watch both the bikes and the red water rushing many feet below. Two boys jumped feet first one after the other into the smooth water pool not far from the drowning remolino. Gloria pointed to the whirlpool. "That was where the hand came out of the water and took the Devil's baby. Cristina showed me."

Gloria grabbed Magdalena's hand. "That's the boy." She pointed to the tall boy. The short boy was just jumping into the river knees to chest.

"I don't think it's the same boy." Miriam squatted and tossed a stone just behind where he was standing. He turned around and waved.

"It is the boy. It is." Gloria waved back. Lasi ran down to where the boy stood and sniffed him. He tossed Lasi a stick and watched her chase it. The short boy made his way up the steep river bank and together the boys played tag with Lasi.

"The Devil's boy? He was born dead." Magdalena began to edge the girls back to their bikes. "Don't throw stones. Don't stare. Don't make them come up here."

"No, the boy who feeds his crazy mother. Mayra told Cristina he lives on the other side of the river." Gloria pointed to the trees on the other shore. "See the smoke. He's cooking her a pig. His mother is so big she can't get out of the house, or cook. Mayra says that all day long he has to go out to pick mangos for her, or to kill a whole pig for her and cook it in a hole in the ground. She eats a whole pig in one sitting. Even the liver and the blood pudding." Gloria walked closer to the edge of the lookout rock. "Look, now he jumped right into the eye where the hand came out of the water to catch the Devil baby." Magdalena gently pushed Gloria toward the bikes. At last the little girls set off to walk the bikes to the dirt road. Magdalena held back. She waited for Lasi and watched until the boy surfaced and climbed uphill with his friend. She waited to see whether or not the long, flat, green rocks by the water turned back into crocodiles. Just as Lasi reached her Magdalena saw one of the rocks stir. She ran as fast as she could to her bike.

"He will never come back up," Gloria said.
"That's the bottomless spot," Miriam said.
Magdalena, who'd seen him walk away, said nothing.

She bicycled Miriam to her door on the street behind her own. Next she dropped Gloria off at her turquoise house next door to Chucho's lime green house. The little girl's house was exactly the same model as Magdalena's but very clean (her mother didn't work outside the house) and had an enclosed garage for her father's fancy car. She bicycled past her own magenta house, in the direction of the avenue, and dropped off Silvia at her sand colored house built by a different contractor. It had two stories, but until recently, no Father. He'd gone into exile not long after the house was finished, and only recently come back, after the Triunfo de la Revolucion.

She waved to Silvia and bicycled the few remaining yards to the avenue. Lasi stretched out on the road, ready for the long wait for a break in the flow of cars coming home to Playa Vieja from the Capital. She looked up at the sky now empty of contra planes. Soldiers in green camouflage and milicianos in olive green marched along the avenue's central island. Mobilized.

At last she crossed the avenue and rode all the way to the street where the blue house stood. She bicycled past the jungle garden of the moonblue house of the Girl who married her own father. She was standing at her door holding her baby. Lasi ran right up and sniffed her. Magdalena didn't mean to catch the Girl's eye. She shuddered. It was a coal black pebble. She sped away. Close to home she slowed down to pass the sunset pink house of the Woman who married her own son. The gate was locked, but she saw through the open front door the woman bent over her mop, sweeping it in big circles and dancing to a loud mambo on the radio. She biked as fast as she could. Was the green car behind her following her? She went faster, faster, faster. Papi had said if any man ever followed her in a car she was to run into any house and ask for help. She pictured herself knocking at the door of the very house of the man who was chasing her.What door could she possibly knock on, when all of these houses held so much danger?

Magdalena plunged into the river's eye. She lay limp in the grip of the current. Red water swirled around her. She let it carry her to a red riversand bank. The bank was in the center where four rivers entered the Rojo. She sat, waist deep in water, her eyes washed red, the whole world red. The river was not so bad. This red world was not so bad. She heard a rumble, a rising drumming, a laugh! Just before the first tongue of river exploded a wall of rushing water, the river laughed! Magdalena let her body lie limp as the wall of brown water hit her, swirled around her. The next water wall came from just behind her left side; another from just behind her right. She let the red foaming water push and turn her. The waters rose and came upon her from the right, pushing, burning her with bits of glassy red sand and blinding her whole world red.

Mami's voice pierced her sleep. She woke up.
"Who have you been talking with? Who's changed you?"
Papi had gotten home in the middle of the night.
"We're leaving." He spoke in his preacher voice.
Mami got louder. "You leave. I'm not going to go."
"It's decided."
"I'm not going."
"I'm leaving. You're leaving. We're all going to go. I'm not going to raise my daughter here to be indoctrinated and taken from me."
"That's not the way it's going to be. I'm staying and tomorrow I'm joining the milicia."

Magdalena trembled in the blue light of her bedroom. She had tossed off her sheet fighting the dreamwaters. She curled into herself against the dawning chill. She had to pee. She set her feet on the cold brownswirled tile and almost wet herself. Coffins! She felt a wave of nausea when she saw Papi's two enormous suitcases in the hallway.

Dona Francisca, the fix everything curandera from Playa Vieja, showed up on time, no matter how hard Magdalena had willed her not to come. Magdalena rolled from under her bed. Lasi crawled out behind her. Magdalena let her into the house. Mami was never home now that she was in the Milicia. Francisca wanted some cola and then she said, "We have to go." In the sunlight Magdalena studied through the woman's starched threadbare housedress the mystery of her breasts. They drooped in one huge round mass down to Francisca's waist.

Francisca walked a few paces ahead along the edge of the gravel road still without the Alvarez' promised sidewalk. She pulled Lasi on a rope. Magdalena waved to Silvia who sat on her porch with the ballerina doll Magdalena said she got to keep. Gloria had gotten Princesa, Miriam the Indian Boy Prince. Francisca walked fast. Magdalena lagged behind. Lasi followed, wagging her innocent tail. They passed the sunset pink house of the woman who married her own son. The gate was padlocked and the door was shut.Francisca didn't even sneak a look. Had she forgotten? As they crossed the avenue they heard bits of the militia's afternoon drill skimming the wind. Mami was with them.

Heading for the center of Playa Vieja they turned into a narrow street and walked past the weathered wood houses once as brilliant as the houses of the Reparto Playa Nueva. Francisca didn't look when they passed the blue house, not at the baby sitting smack in the middle of the mane of grass, in the swarm of gnats, in the devil buzz of bugs; not at the mother, a skinny cinderella, mopping the narrow porch. Magdalena stared right at the woman's face, looking for the coal hard eyes.

The bodega, made of plastered, white washed brick, stood high off the ground on a corner and had doors on both streets. Magdalena stood outside while Francisca took Lasi up the steps into the men's door. Three men at the counter drinking pee colored beer in bottles turned to stare. Two women climbed down the other door with their week's rice and beans. Francisca walked past the drinkers, and handed the bodeguero the dog's rope. Magdalena saw Lasi tilt her head to one side. Francisca had to yank her hand to pull her away. When they turned the corner Lasi began to howl.

On the way back, just past the blue house, Magdalena doubled over and screamed. Francisca sat her down on a big rock by the side of the street. She clutched Magdalena's hand. Magdalena pointed to her lower belly. The pain was too terrible to speak. It took an hour to walk home, stopping every few feet to wait out the pain. "Now you're a Senorita." Francisca kissed Magdalena and went away.

Alone in her own bathroom she leaned against the bathroom door, pulled down her panties and saw two lipshaped stripes of blood. More secret blood tears. Here was one thing Mayra and Cristina hadn't been lying about after all.

Magdalena lay under her bed with Lasi, eyes closed. Cristina's Ouija had said Bebito would come to see her. But it had been her own hands making the Ouija move. Did she believe her own hands? She wasn't like Cristina or like Mayra, teaching analfabetos, mobilizing, kissing boys. She was The Girl Nothing Would Happen To. She recognized Gloria's fists pounding on her half shut glass windows. "Come out. He's here."

Magdalena slipped into her sandals and met Gloria by the gravel street. Besides being the Man Magdalena Should Marry, beautiful brown Bebito was Gloria's cousin. "He's waiting for you behind Silvia's." She made her way through the shoulder high flowering weeds. This moment so often wrongly divined by the Ouija, a moment she had longed for since Bebito's family moved back to the Capital months ago, now felt like it wasn't happening at all. There he stood, at the end of the path the girls had worn in the lot between Magdalena's house and Silvia's, the lot where Magdalena, Cristina, Chucho and Bebito had played revolucion when they were still children and still played. For a second she didn't know him in the olive green militia uniform. "Look." He stretched out his hand. The gun he held was enormous. She stepped back.
"Is it true you are going North?"
She nodded."My Papi and I. My Mother's a miliciana. Tomorrow she's going back to her family in the Capital."
He put away the gun. They walked in step around Silvia's concrete fence.
She swallowed hard. "Some girls my age have novios."
He shook his head. "I'm only going to have one novia. The one I'm going to marry." He holstered the gun. "I'm going to engineering school. I won't be getting married for a long time."
"You're not going to be a doctor after all?"
"The revolution needs engineers."
They stood in silence. Behind him she could see the deep pink of the sun setting over Playa Vieja. He started to walk away, stopped, came back, leaned forward, kissed her on the lips and ran. She watched until he reached the avenue and turned and she couldn't see him any more. Now she was a girl who had been kissed.

That night she was wakened by scratching on her windows. Lasi. She ran to the front door and let her in. The rope she had broken to run away from the bodega hung shredded from her neck, mudblack. Magdalena cut if off. She let Lasi in her bed. She smelled of bacalao. Tomorrow she would have to pay for this with a beating but now she nestled into Lasi's furry neck. Everyone got to have one person who was theirs and she was Lasi's. (Others failed at this. Others disappointed. But she, Magdalena would not disappoint Lasi and her little girls. She sobbed. That had been her pact and she had failed. That pact had beenher onlyh power and she had betrayed it and now forever she was powerless. )

As the coffin suitcases were loaded into the white Plymouth, the black Chinese lacquered furniture was being loaded into the magenta house. Magdalena didn't look closely at the short plump woman directing the movers, or her two teenaged girls who would now be sleeping in her room, on her new colonial bed, because the buyers had gotten most of the furniture.

She stood out in the empty lot glad that it was early in the morning and up and down the block the houses' windows were shut. Francisca who was going to keep Lasi, waited on the porch. Magdalena knelt by Lasi, hugged her hard, and sobbed. She walked the full length of the driveway never once looking up and then took Mami's old place on the front seat.

She watched her dog chase after the car, past the sunset pink house of the woman who married her own son, and the blue house of the one who married her own father. Lasi chased the car the way she did every time the family drove away. Magdalena knew there was no way Lasi could know this time was the very last.