Barbara Kingsolver - Animal Dreams

Emelina hadn’t gone anywhere without a child in thirteen years. Out of habit she packed a roll of paper towels in her purse. As we drove out of Grace she gasped for air, wide-eyed, like a hooked fish. “I can’t believe I’m doing this,” she kept saying. “Turn the truck around. I can’t go.”

I drove westward, ignoring my hostage. “What, you think J.T. doesn’t know how to take care of his own sons?”

“No,” she said, staring at the center line. “I’m afraid I’ll come back and find him dead on the kitchen floor with a Conquerers of the Castle arrow stuck on his head and a fistful of Hostess Ding Dongs.”

By the time we hit the interstate she’d decided it would work out. The boys could go to college on J.T.’s life insurance.

“Oh, they won’t pay if it’s murder,” I said gravely.

She brightened a little. “I always forget. He’s the one that wanted so many kids.”

It was mid-December, fourteen shopping days till Christmas, and by afternoon it was clear and cold. Twenty-two women in winter coats and support hose took the streets of downtown Tucson by storm, in pairs, each cradling a papier-mâché piñata in her arms. No one who witnessed the event would soon forget it.

Emelina and I and the truck were more or less set up as headquarters. We parked in front of a chichi restaurant called the Café Gertrude Stein, for the sole reason that it sported an enormous green plastic torso out front and the women felt they could find their way back to this landmark. As soon as they sold their birds, they were to head back for more. Emelina and I held the fort, perched carefully in the midst of our pyramid of paper birds.

A man in a black fedora and glen plaid scarf came out of the café and gave us a startled look. We’d not been there when he went in. “How much?” he asked.

This had been a much-debated question; apparently the Greyhound driver had threatened to stop the bus if the Stitch-and-Bitchers didn’t quit yelling about it. Ultimately we’d been instructed to try and get what we could.

“How bad do you want it?” asked Emelina, saucily crossing her legs. Monogamous as a goose, and a natural-born flirt.

A small crowd of homeless people had gathered on the other side of the street from where our truck was parked. It seems we were by a good margin the best entertainment of their day.

“Fifty dollars?” the man in the scarf asked.

Emelina and I looked at each other, cool as cukes. “They’re made by hand,” I said.

“Sixty?”

“Okay.”

He handed us three twenties and Emelina forked over a plastic-wrapped bird. Its tail bobbed gently behind him as he made his way down the street. I mouthed the words, “Sixty dollars!” and we collapsed against each other.

“They’re made by hand,” Emelina said, eyebrows arched, in perfect imitation of an Empress of the Universe.

Miss Lorraine Colder and Miss Elva Dann came back to the truck almost immediately. They’d enlisted a bag lady named Jessie, who owned her own shopping cart. When Miss Lorraine explained the threat to the homes of Grace, Jessie cried for a little while and then rallied her wits. They were able to pack half a dozen piñatas into her cart, and the trio of women set out to sell them all in a single foray.

Norma Galvez, in the meantime, lost her partner at a crosswalk and had to be escorted back to the big green naked lady by a bicycle policeman named Officer Metz. In a conversation that lasted only five blocks she’d acquired an amazing number of facts about this man: for example, he had twin daughters born on Christmas Day, and wore a hernia belt. She told Emelina and me these things when she introduced him. Officer Metz was sympathetic, but did ask if the ladies had a vendor’s permit. Mrs. Galvez, a quick thinker, explained that we weren’t selling anything. We were soliciting donations to save our town. Each and every donor got a free peacock piñata. In the interest of public relations she gave him one to take home to his twins.

By five o’clock we were out of birds. As it turned out, Emelina and I didn’t make the best sale of the day. While too many peacocks went for only ten or fifteen, Doña Althea haggled one elderly gentleman up to seventy-five dollars. When the transaction was completed, the Doña allowed him to kiss her hand.

By the time they were back in Grace on the last evening bus, I was later informed, the Stitch and Bitch Club had already laid plans to come back in ten days with five hundred peacock piñatas. There would be only two deviations from the original plan. First, each piñata would be accompanied by a written history of Grace and its heroic struggle against the Black Mountain Mining Company. To my shock I was elected, in absentia, to write this epic broadside and get it mimeographed at the school. (Miss Lorraine and Miss Elva had retired.) Second, the price would be fixed at sixty dollars. Some argued for seventy-five but the Doña overruled, pointing out that she couldn’t be expected to kiss every damn cowboy in Tucson.

Emelina and I let ourselves into my old house. Carlo was expecting us and had left the key under the usual brick. The neighborhood seemed even seedier than when I left. There was some demolition going on, with cheerfully nasty graffiti decorating the plywood construction barriers. Our old house with its bolted-down flowerpots stood eerily untouched, inside and out. Carlo had let all the plants finish dying, as expected, but beyond that he’d made no effort to make the place his own. He seemed to be living like a man in mourning, not wishing to disturb the traces of a deceased wife. Or wives.

“This is creepy, Carlo,” I told him when he got home late that night from his ER shift. “Why haven’t you moved things around? It looks like Hallie and I just walked out yesterday.”

He shrugged. “What’s to move around?”

Emelina had gone to bed, trying, I believe, to stay out of our way. She’d kept asking me if it wouldn’t be awkward for us to stay with my “ex.” It was hard for her to understand that Carlo and I were really “exes” right from the start. Having no claim on each other was the basis of our relationship.

I’d stayed up watching the news so I could see him when he got home. He slumped down next to me on the couch with a bag of potato chips.

“That your dinner?”

“You my mother?”

“I should hope not.” On the news they were talking about an ordinance that banned charity Santas from collecting donations in shopping malls. The owner of a sporting-goods store was explaining that it took away business. Rows of hunting bows were lined up behind him like the delicately curved bones of a ribcage.

“You look exhausted,” I told Carlo. He really did.

“I sewed a nose back on tonight. Cartilage and all.”

“That’ll take it out of you.”

“So what’s creepy about the way I’m living?” In his light-green hospital scrubs, Carlo looked paler and smaller than I remembered him. No visible muscles.

“It looks like you’re living in limbo,” I said. “Waiting for somebody else to move in here and cook a real meal for you and hang up pictures.”

“You never did either of those things.”

“I know. But it’s different when there’s two people living in a house with no pictures. It looks like you’re just too busy having fun with each other to pay attention to the walls.”

“I miss you. We did have fun.”

“Not that much. You miss Hallie.” Being here made me miss her too, more tangibly than in Grace. On these scarred wooden floors, Hallie had rolled up the rugs and attempted to teach us to moonwalk.

“How is she? Does she ever write you? I got one postcard, from Nogales.”

“Yeah, we write. She’s real busy.” I didn’t tell him we wrote a lot . We’d revived an intensity of correspondence we hadn’t had since 1972, the year I escaped from Grace and Hallie came into a late puberty, both of us entirely on our own. This time she was over her head with joy and I with something like love or dread, but we still needed each other to make sure it was real. We had to live with an odd, two-week lag to our conversations. I’d be writing her about some small, thrilling victory at school, and she’d be addressing the blue funk I was in two weeks ago when I was getting my period. It didn’t matter; we kept writing, knowing it would someday even out.