Robert Wilson - Memory Wire

She took pride in her goodness in a way that sometimes offended her friends, and she grew increasingly circumspect. But she knew, without actually thinking the words, that this was not a priggish or gloating kind of goodness; that the skills her mother encouraged in her were in fact survival skills, and survival was by no means assured. She had witnessed the attrition among her friends. Many of her friends had died of diseases or had been remanded to orphanages or had simply moved away, a fate she associated with death because she could not comprehend the notion of a larger world. She accepted these truths with a resignation accessible only to the very young, and acquiesced to her mother’s regimen of education and careful virtue. She was a good little girl.

For many of the same reasons it did not seem strange that she did not have a father. She had had one once. Her mother told her so. Her father had been a wise and brave man who had died attempting to bring them over the border from the Republic of Mexico when she was just a baby. They had been respectable people in Mexico. Her father had been a lawyer. In the Aguilar purges of the ’30s, any member of the bar was considered an enemy. And so they had to escape, but Aguilar was a staunch friend of the United States and the border had been closed even to respectable lawyers and their families. They made a border run with thirty other ragged men and women, running a gauntlet of desert and barbed wire and infrared detectors and satellite surveillance and the broad concrete no-man’s-land that separated the sovereign nations. The little girl had no memory of this, but the story had been told to her many times: it was a kind of legend, a brave and daunting mythology. Many of the refugees had been cut down by automated gunfire. Her father had been one of these. Her mother took up the child and pressed on, too frightened even for grief. (The grief, it was implied, had come later.) Many more of their group had been arrested and deported; a few had escaped into the Hispanic ghetto sprawls that crowded against the border fences. The little girl and her mother had been among this lucky minority.

They were not wealthy enough to start a new life as Americans—they could not afford permanent black-market documentation—but there was enough money to buy passage into the Floats, where the rules were suspended and they could have, at least, this compromised shadow existence; never legal, but no longer vulnerable to the caprices of the Aguilar regime.

She could not remember her father except through these stories, and so his absence never seemed strange to her, until the day her mother brought a new man home.

She was ten, and she was outraged. She saw the guilt in her mother’s eyes and was both angry and frightened by it. She was too young to understand the adult clash of loyalties, the fear of age and the fear of death. She was only old enough to feel betrayed. She did not deserve this. She was a good girl.

She hated the man instantly. His name was Carlos and he worked at the loading dock where the girl’s mother did occasional day labor. Meeting her, Carlos bent down, put his immense hand on her shoulder, and told her he had met her mother at work. “She’s a good worker,” Carlos said. He straightened, grinned obscenely, swatted the girl’s mother across the bottom. “Eh? She does what she’s told.”

The girl was appalled by this sudden vision of her mother as a separate entity, a grown-up woman with a hidden life of her own. She did not say anything, only stood with her face carefully blank and one hand bracing herself against the kitchen table. Inside, she was writhing. Everything seemed suddenly tawdry. She was conscious of the peeling tile under her feet, the shabbiness of the float shanty they inhabited. Beans were cooking on the stovetop; a smoky, foul aroma filled the tiny room. And Carlos continued to grin down at her, the broad pores of his face radiating sweat and insincerity. His teeth were chipped and vulpine; his breath smelled like spoiled food.

He was not a lawyer.

He moved in. She was not consulted about it. He moved in and filled the shack with his noxious presence. He took up more space, the little girl thought, than any ordinary man. He bumped into things. He drank—though not, at first, excessively. His huge hands moved over the girl’s mother with an aggressive intimacy which was received without resistance or encouragement. The walls dividing the two rooms were thin enough that there was no mystery about what happened during the night: it was sex, the little girl thought, a messiness of grunting and moaning, unspeakable. When it happened, she would hide her face and cover her ears. In the mornings Carlos would grin at her and whisper: “How did you sleep, little one? Too noisy for you?” And laugh a secret, terrible laugh at the back of his throat.

One day when Carlos was at work, the little girl dared to ask her mother why she had allowed him to move in.

The contempt in her voice was impossible to conceal, and her mother slapped her for it. The girl gaped and raised one hand to her wounded face. Her cheek was on fire.

The girl’s mother flushed. “We’re not in a position to choose,” she said fiercely. “Look at me! Am I young? Am I pretty? Look! Am I rich?”

And the girl observed for the first time that her mother was none of these things.

“He brings money in. Maybe you don’t know what that means. You don’t look at your plate when you eat. Maybe you should. There’s meat there. Meat! And green vegetables. You have clothes. You don’t go hungry.”

So we are poor, the girl thought. Carlos was the curse of their poverty.

These things astonished and frightened her.

She might have adjusted, even so. Except that now Carlos himself began to change. Bad as he was to begin with, he grew worse. His drinking intensified. The girl’s mother confided that Carlos was having trouble on the job, fighting with the foreman. Some nights the grunting and moaning in the next room would end in muffled curses. Carlos would not make jokes the next morning, merely glower at his breakfast. His casual intimacy with the girl’s mother became more aggressive; he tossed her back and forth in his arms in a way that made the girl think of a woman being mauled by a bear. Increasingly that was what Carlos seemed to her to be: a large and powerful animal fuming in a cage. But the cage was insubstantial; the cage, its restraint, could vanish at any moment. She didn’t like to think about that.

He began to touch her more often.

She accepted this at first the way her mother accepted it, with passive resignation. She was aware of her mother watching closely when Carlos coaxed her into his lap. Carlos had hands like hairless animals, hands like moles. They moved with a blind volition of their own. They touched and stroked her. Usually when she had endured this for a time, Carlos would stand up abruptly, scowl at her as if she had done something wrong, take the girl’s mother off into the bedroom.

Her mother apologized one day. They were alone. The float shack rose in a gentle swell; rain beat against the roof and the bilge pumps rattled under the floor. “I’m sorry,” her mother said. “What’s happening … I didn’t expect it.”

The girl felt an anger well up in her, huge and unexpected. “Then make him leave!” She astonished herself with tears. “Tell him to go away!”

Her mother hugged and soothed her. “It’s not that easy. I wish it were. I’m sorry. I’m sorry. It’s hard to be alone. You don’t understand that. It’s been difficult. Difficult to be alone. I thought he would help, you know. I really thought he would.” She stroked the girl’s hair. “I thought he might learn to love us.”

That night, when Carlos began to touch her, her mother told the little girl to go to her room. She listened through the door as the two adults spoke and then shouted. There was a scuffling, the girl’s mother cried out, a door slammed. The little girl waited but there was no more sound. She was afraid to go out. She slept finally, trembling in her sleep.