Page 49 - WTPVol.XI#4

The following morning my mother dropped me off at Joanie’s as she did each weekday on her way to the diner where she worked the early shift. I found Pedro bent over his snakes. I watched as he adjusted the substrate bedding and moved a shaft of driftwood, murmuring to them in Spanish. The way he fussed over them made me wonder about his family. We all knew the summer men had wives and children back home; it hung in the air like overripe fruit no one dared pluck, fearing its pulpy and exposed insides. It added, too, to their mystery as they disappeared each fall and reappeared the following growing season, like one of the marvels of spring. That morning I wondered if Pedro had a daughter somewhere, a teenager like me.
I left him alone and went into the kitchen. The twins were at the table eating Cheerios, milk leaking down their chins. Pedro came in and I felt his eyes on me, their intensity blinding. Through the open window came the snapping chorus of cicadas warning of an- other hot day. I ran my fingers through my long dark hair, the back of my neck damp, wishing Pedro would turn down the bright lights of his eyes. I could hear Joanie moving around her bedroom and I wondered what Pedro had told her.
“Emily,” he said quietly.
I shook my head to indicate I didn’t want to talk about it, the weight of my lie building, pulling him in.
“Please,” I whispered, bending over the twins to wipe their faces. “I shouldn’t have said anything.”
He stepped toward me, and I looked up at him just as Joanie walked into the kitchen.
“What?” she said, her eyes flicking back and forth
between the two of us.
Pedro and I both got busy, me cleaning up the break- fast things, Pedro suddenly hunting around his pockets. Joanie stared hard at us for a moment, then yanked on the handle of the refrigerator. She handed Pedro a metal lunch pail shaped like a barn, having packed a feast to sustain him as he labored alongside the other workers all day in the heat. The lunch an offering, an embrace that would reveal itself as he sat beneath the shade of a tree and discovered the abundance she’d put there. Each morning she’d drop Pedro off at the Mucks, and I imagined her blow-
ing kisses as he walked toward the other workers, remembering the night before. Then she’d continue on to the rectory at St. Mary’s where she was both re- ceptionist and secretary for the parish priest, arriving each summer morning in a sleeveless dress scented with Jean Nate.
“Let’s go,” she said to Pedro with an authority that seemed to come with her size. Ample arms and thick shoulders, and breasts like small mountains. Pedro and I made sure not to look at each other as he fol- lowed behind her.
At the door she stopped and turned around—and my breath caught.
“Cool it,” she said.
She and Pedro turned to go. He touched his hand to the small of her back, leading her out the door and I felt that familiar ache and turned away.
The twins and I spent the day as we often did, at the park where they spilled around the play equipment like tumble weed. When they started to fight and throw dirt at each other I took them home to wash their hands and feed them hotdogs sliced into meaty coins. After lunch they napped, putting up a resis- tance that deflated once I pulled the shades in their hot room and turned on the fan.
While they slept I returned to Joanie’s bedroom and began to snoop through her drawers, examining her bras and panties and imagining what it would feel
like to be a woman with a lover. I imagined myself floating around in sheer, gauzy fabrics, my nipples showing, catching my lover’s eye. I slipped on one of Joanie’s nighties—a red, lacy affair—but given the dif- ference in our sizes the nightie gaped so low my own small breasts stood exposed. I studied myself in the mirror, turning one way and then another, listening for the twins and the sound of any unexpected arrival
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