Barbara Kingsolver - Animal Dreams

I stayed in the shower forever trying to rinse the salt out of my scalp and skin. I had fantasies of not going to this thing, but Emelina would be hurt, and also my house sat in the middle of the party like a floral centerpiece. It would be hard to pretend not to be home. I put on the most minimal thing I owned, a white cotton dress, and sneaked out my front door.

It was like a high-school reunion. Everyone was boisterously friendly and dying to be filled in on the last decade and a half, which in my case was not that pretty a picture, and of course they asked about Hallie. Children ran underfoot like rebel cockroaches. Emelina, my guardian angel, kept setting me up in conversations before running off to clean up some mess the kids had gotten into or check on the goat.

J.T. came over and gave me a hug that lifted me off the ground-but that’s J.T., plus a few beers. It really was nice to see him. “I hear you wrecked a train,” I said.

“Wrecked her good,” he said. J.T. was broad-shouldered and dark, with the kind of face that’s made more handsome, not less, by the scars of teenage acne. We’d known each other since we were babies. His older sister Pocha was at the party, and his brothers Cristobal, Gus, and Arturo, all of whom had been our neighbors when Hallie and I were small. I remembered playing Dutchman’s tag with them at the graveyard on All Souls’ Days-it was always a huge family picnic up there-until Doc Homer decided the graveyard was off limits. (Bird mites no doubt.)

People were jammed into the courtyard belly to elbow and it soon got too noisy to talk. I stood near the edge of things, in the shade of an olive that was probably planted when the house was built, middle-aged as olives go. A band called the Sting Rays, featuring one of J.T.’s formerly pigeon-toed cousins, was belting out “Rosa Lee.” I spotted Loyd across the way, but would have had to step on a hundred toes to get to him. He was leaning against the wall with his arms crossed, paying attention to a small woman in a strapless dress. Loyd looked like someone in a cigarette ad, except he wasn’t smoking: white T-shirt, white smile, those models are always the picture of health. His hair was mink black, in a ponytail. And he had terrific arms. I hate to admit things like this, but in a certain frame of mind I am a sucker for good muscle definition.

A woman approached me suddenly from behind and shouted, “Codi Noline! God, honey, you look like a rock ‘n’ roll star.”

In my sundress and dimestore thongs I looked no more like a rock ‘n’ roll star than Mother Teresa. “I’ll take that as a compliment,” I said. “I take them where I can get them nowadays.”

“Lord, I know what you mean,” she said. It was Trish Garcia, who was a cheerleader and clandestine smoker when I’d last known her. Now she smoked openly, had a raspy cough, and looked like a cartwheel was out of the question. “I heard Hallie’s in South Africa.”

I laughed. “Nicaragua.”

“Well, what in the world’s she doing there?”

In high school, Hallie and I were beneath Trish’s stratum of normal conversation. I remembered every day of those years, no lapses there. Once in the bathroom I’d heard her call us the bean-pole sisters, and speculate that we wore hand-me-down underwear. I wondered how the rules had changed. Had I come up in the world, or Trish down? Or perhaps growing up meant we put our knives away and feigned ignorance of the damage. “She’s teaching people how to grow crops without wrecking the soil,” I said. “She has her master’s in integrated pest management.”

Trish looked indifferent, but she was working hard at being unimpressed, whereas before it came naturally. I took this as a good sign. “Well, I guess it pays good,” she said.

“No, they’re not really paying her, just living expenses is about all, I think. She’s doing it just to do it. She wants to be part of a new society.”

Trish stared. I pretended Hallie was there at the party somewhere, about to walk up behind me. “Six or seven years ago they threw out the dictator and gave all his land to the poor people,” I said. “But they need a lot of help in the farming department now, because these soldiers keep attacking the poor farmers from across the border and burning up their crops.”

Hallie would laugh at “farming department.” She’d laugh at the whole scene, the education of Trish the Cheerleader. She would love me.

“The Communists,” Trish said knowingly. “I heard about that. I heard they’re thinking about sending the Marines down there to stop them from doing that.”

“No, it’s the other way around,” I said patiently. “The Marines aren’t rooting for the new society. The U.S. is paying the contras, the guys that attack the farmers.” Hallie would not laugh now, she would be inflamed. She said we were a nation in love with forgetting the facts. She saved clippings that proved it. When Castro released those prisoners from Mariel: One day the headlines said we’d gotten him to free all these wonderful political prisoners. A month later when they were burning down halfway houses in Miami the papers castigated Fidel for exporting his hooligans and junkies.

Trish fiddled with her bra strap. “Hallie always would just up and do anything under the blue sky,” she said.

“You’re right,” I told Trish. “I wish I were that brave. I’d be scared to death to be where she is.”

“Well, you know, we can’t all be the hero,” she said, jutting her lower jaw to blow smoke up toward the olive branches. If I could have drawn blood, if I’d known how to do that with words instead of a needle, I would have. I wasn’t sure what Hallie craved but I knew it wasn’t glory.

“How’s Doc Homer?” she asked.

I hadn’t yet found the valor to go see him. I feared seeing him in failing condition. And still disapproving of me, on top of it. “Hard to say,” I said.

I felt a tap on my shoulder and turned to see Loyd, grinning broadly. “Too good to speak to an Indian boy on Main Street?”

The tingle of a blush started behind my ears, and I ignored it. I’d learned since high school that in an emergency shyness can be disguised with a completely fake bravado. “You tried to run me down, Loyd! I ought to turn you in for reckless driving.” I ran my fingers through my hair. “Actually, I didn’t think you’d know who I was.”

“Are you kidding? How many beautiful six-foot-tall women you think we’ve got in this town?”

“Five eleven,” I corrected. “I’m the shorter of the bean-pole sisters.” I felt suddenly drunk, though I wasn’t, chemically speaking. Trish drifted off toward the barbecue pit.

He looked at me for a long time, just looked. Grinning. His left hand was fingering the tip of an olive branch and I expected him to snap it off but he didn’t, he only took in its texture as someone might eat chocolate or inhale a cigarette.

“You want another beer?” he asked.

So that was going to be it, no filling in the last fifteen years. No constructing ourselves for each other-otherwise known as falling in love. “Think you can get over to that ice chest and back before this party is over?” I knew he wouldn’t.

“In case I don’t, I’ve got your phone number.” He winked.

“Don’t you worry. You’ll be hearing from my lawyer.”

I felt adrift and disappointed, though I hadn’t held any conscious expectations of Loyd. I looked around at other faces, wondering if they all held secret disappointments for me. Doña Althea, the ancient woman we used to call the “Peacock Lady,” was holding court in a lawn chair under the fig tree. She was the one who used to collect the feathers for piñatas. She looked today like she always had, dressed in black, fierce and miniature like a frightening breed of small dog. Even with her braided crown of silver hair she wasn’t five feet tall. J.T.’s mother, Viola Domingos, and several other women sat in a group with her, fanning themselves in time to the music and drinking beer. J.T. and Loyd had apparently been commandeered into serving them food; the goat had been pronounced done. People were beginning to move toward the makeshift table, which I’d helped Emelina improvise from the doors to Mason’s and the twins’ rooms, covered with embroidered tablecloths compliments of the Stitch and Bitch Club. There was enough food to save an African nation. Potato salad, deviled eggs, menudo , tortillas and refried beans and a thousand kinds of dessert. I heard somebody say in a highpitched voice, “Tomato soup in that cake? I wouldn’t have guessed that for love nor money.”