and “goodbyes” of an Ysleta Christmas, when David and Jean Catherine returned to his boyhood home in El Paso.
David could see, just around a heavy outcropping of black slate and tree roots, a glimpse of the Brazilian’s stone stairs that led up to the backyard of his house. He pushed and pulled his body with all his might, imagined he had moved significantly, but then realized he had traveled perhaps a few feet in fifteen minutes. David’s head was also woozy. White flashes erupted in front of his face. He blacked out again, only to find himself face-up, staring at the trees, a yellow leaf wafting toward his eyes. His numb leg, he noticed, had ballooned inside his pants. The thumping in his heart seemed to have picked up permanent speed.
David hallucinated about chickens, about carrying them in New England, two crazed chickens in each hand. This was the first job on a rancho near the Rio Grande his parents bestowed upon him as a twelve-year-old. Chickens stabbing at his thighs, chickens shitting in mid-air and on his sneakers, chickens pecking his eyes out, chickens disemboweling him, hungry for his liver, digging for his kidneys… David imagined swinging a sledgehammer again and again to obliterate another wall, trapped in a gigantic maze of his father’s walls, carrying cinderblock after cinderblock until he dropped to his knees—glimpses of his father shaking his head at him and David the teenager with a murderous rage against all the blackness in front of him—working, working, working beyond exhaustion. Eres demasiado terco.
As David dragged himself through the forest underbrush, his mind incanted what seemed like a prayer. My father. My sons. Can’t give up. Will not. God, please help me. Jean Catherine, find me. My father. My sons. Can’t give up, goddamnit. Help me, please. Fight. Will not pass out. Another foot. Keep going, one more. Up these stairs, el gran Pelé at Maracaña. Fight. Dear God. Goddamn Pilgrims. Fuckin’ Aztecs. This earth will not defeat me.
His body half on the first two stone steps to his yard, David vomited onto his bloody shirt and over the stone step scraping his elbow. A blinding white light of pain obliterated his mind. His swollen right leg was twisted in front of him, a useless husk. He passed out for a moment again, in a heavy sweat. When he opened his eyes, David thought he heard another rustle in the brush below him, near the ferns and hostas around the creek. Can’t give up. Keep going. Fuck. Goddamnit, just keep going. David dragged himself up another step and then another, his body now draped on the final stone step. He was panting. Leaves swayed above him. He could see the sun and had the sensation he was underwater. He had pissed in his pants, and blood covered his legs and shirt and face. He imagined the wild thumping inside his chest could only go for so long before his heart exploded into pieces as he lay half on the grass of his backyard and half on the sharp corner of that final step, imagining a sea red with blood, imagining he was like a sculpture sinking to a bottomless pit beyond the sun above him. The trees. He could still see a few yellowish green leaves swaying in the wind. In the wind, a droning. The garage’s door. Can’t give up. Keep going. My father. My sons. Jean Catherine…
A LIVING MUSEUM OF LOVE
Before Sarah or anyone else downstairs came up to Stanley’s bathroom, Carlos took the Cialis and jammed it in his pocket. No one would miss one bottle in a cabinet with maybe fifteen different prescriptions sitting beside them. Did Carlos have any clue what they’re for? No. He studied revolutionary movements in Mexico, not pharmaceuticals. Stanley’s daughters—Carlos’s wife Sarah and his sister-in-law Deborah—would soon throw away the lot, and Carlos didn’t care about the cufflinks, watches, and shotguns Deborah’s husband Sam coveted from his dead father-in-law. Okay, here I am, the Mexican stealing from my father-in-law. How crass is that? But Stan won’t need these anymore. Carlos alternately stared in the mirror and then turned to study the pills still left in the bottle he’d just stolen. Would he dare take one to see what would happen? He had already slipped two of the best old Playboys from Stanley’s musty stacks in the attic: Jenny McCarthy, October 1993, and Stephanie Seymour, March 1991.
Three months ago, Stanley had died of a heart attack, and their house on the Merrimack River in Newburyport, Massachusetts would be up for sale in six weeks. Carlos thought about this grand old house, or at least how grand it had once seemed to him as a Harvard undergraduate from El Paso, Texas. Three decades ago. When he still wore more t-shirts and blue jeans than button-down Oxfords and khakis. When Sarah was this wicked-smart Jewish girl from the suburbs of Boston who loved canoeing and spoke Spanish perfectly, one of the many attributes Carlos’s father and mother would come to adore about her. Three decades ago. Before graduate school, their children Jonathan and Ethan, and New York’s Upper Westside. Before the “You-are-not-a-Jew” tomahawk to his chest by his future mother-in-law, Nancy, at the announcement of their betrothal. Nancy, Stanley’s wife from Waban. Nancy, who had too often blurted put-downs from her cushioned throne in her kitchen like a rugelach bursting with nuts and raisins. Nancy who now, with slight dementia, sat helplessly, her face lost in the flow of the river, and smiled distractedly at her daughters and son and even her Mexican-American son-in-law. Carlos even loved his mother-in-law, despite the memory of her old attacks against “the Spaniard” her daughter was marrying. Was it the dementia or simply time and Carlos’s stubbornness that had worn away his mother-in-law’s hatred and pettiness? Was it his good relationship with his father-in-law, the erudite oncologist and once-Conservative Jew from Manhattan, who appreciated that his son-in-law had scored a tenured job at Columbia University, his old alma mater? Who knows what changes the human heart. Who knows if it changes at all. Maybe the objects around it simply change too, so the heart-in-the-world is only an older heart lost in a different world. The question then becomes: Are we the same person as our younger selves, or a collection of different selves in new worlds, or something disquietly suspended between the past and the present?
Carlos remembered the first week he had really met the Mondsheins in Newburyport, when Sarah and he were writing their senior theses, she on the literature of revolution in Latin America—Mariano Azuela, José Vasconcelos, Martín Luis Guzman—and he on the Mexican Revolution itself, a historian-in-the-making. He remembered Nancy’s “Spaniard” comment, which red-faced Sarah corrected in her offhanded way. Carlos also remembered making love to Sarah at the Mondscheins after a day of writing and work. In her old bedroom, while her parents slept downstairs, Sarah encouraging him, “As long as we keep quiet.” She had jammed towels at the bottom of her bedroom door. The college boyfriend, Carlos couldn’t believe her parents had allowed him to stay not just one night, but an entire week, to write their magnum opuses of their undergraduate years. He could only imagine his mother barging in with a cast-iron skillet to smash his head if ever he dared to bring a girl home and close his bedroom door in Ysleta. Or what his father would do, calling the father of the girl, the two joining together, with baseball bats, to teach these sinvergüenzas how to respect a Mexican home. Newburyport was like hitting the Mexican lottery for young Carlos: from the panoramic view of the Merrimack River in their living room with a black Steinway grand piano nobody played, to delicious Sarah every night, kind and sweet Sarah, Sarah whom he would marry years later. And now Newburyport, this house along the river, would be dismantled, sold, the Mondscheins but a memory. The patriarch was dead: Stanley Phillip Mondshein. He had indeed created different selves. Oncologist who had saved many lives and wouldn’t stop lecturing his children about the country’s healthcare problems. Intellectual who read David McCullough, Walter Isaacson, and Playboy. Jewish macho who was a revelation to his son-in-law from the United States-Mexico border. The Cialis jingled in Carlos’s pocket as he walked into Sarah’s old bedroom with its sunflowers-on-lime-green wallpaper and a human-size, stuffed green frog collapsed in one corner.
“Ready to go?” he asked a few minutes later as Sarah entered the room. She wasn’t quite packed yet. They still had a long drive to New York City. Was she about to cry? Carlos jammed the Cialis deeper into a running sneaker. “What’s wrong?”
“My dad…it’s so sad.”
Carlos hugged her. He had always loved her scent, which wasn’t flowery or sweet, not like licorice or
