Black Rainbow Page 3

  Christmas came and went. Mrs. Lucero hung a beautiful star over the shrine she tended so carefully, as carefully as she tended the roses. It was a blue grotto of concrete that housed a statue of the Virgin of Guadalupe. The Virgin stood on a rainbow and crushed the serpent of evil beneath her foot. Paper roses made a halo about her mantle. The star was made of golden lights that blinked off and on. Sometimes in the middle of the night Bud would get up and go to sleep on the couch, and then Mary Rose couldn’t sleep either. She’d lean out, elbows on the window sill, and watch the light of the star blinking off and on. Mary Rose wasn’t a Catholic, but it seemed natural to pray, Give me back my baby. Sometimes she would add for emphasis, Give me back my baby right now. Or, bargaining like every supplicant, Give me back my baby and I’ll do anything, anything at all.

  On the right night, Mary Rose put on her new black nightgown and Bud came willingly into her arms. Mrs. Lucero had taken down the star after Epiphany, and it was dark in the bedroom.

  CHAPTER 5

  MONIQUE’S MOTHER CALLED GRACE promptly the next morning to inform her of what we had done. This raised Monique’s mother immensely in Grace’s estimation. In a way, I was relieved to be grounded. It gave me a reprieve from having to jump off the George Washington Bridge if Monique told me to. I looked forward to the quiet life.

  It was raining again, gray rain that washed the last of the leaves into the street. My father gave up and let the roof leak gently. Soon it would be snowing, and he would have other troubles: frozen pipes, slippery walks, a car that started grudgingly in the morning. Horse chestnuts fell, smooth and glossy, their prickly green casings turned brown and began to rot. In spring, saplings would come from every nut, but not yet. The houses along our street were edged in thorn bushes, their sharp, leafless needles hung with bright red berries. I didn’t know their proper name.

  Everyone in the house had a cold but me. Grace would hack into a tissue and then glare at me, as if my un-runny nose was a personal insult. Still, my new black leather boots leaked and my uniform blazer itched with wet wool. The whole world smelled like an elementary school cafeteria: meatloaf, rubber galoshes, something burnt. For entertainment, I took to hiding in my father’s walk-in closet, smoking my black Balkan-Sobranies, and trying on his ties. I wrapped a paisley one around my forehead so that I looked like the pictures of hippie girls in LIFE magazine. I added a blue silk one to my waist, but my stomach stuck out too much underneath. I discovered a half eaten package of M & M’s with peanuts in my pocket and ate the remaining ones slowly. In school, the wild seniors always said, “The red ones make you sterile, the green ones make you fertile.” Those were the girls with the IUDs and the contraceptive diaphragms they’d gotten at a clinic up the river over in New York. Dispensing birth control to a minor was illegal in New Jersey. I tried to eat only the red M & M’s, but then I ate the green ones, too.

  My father’s closet smelled of cedar and aftershave. It smelled of moths and mothballs, of things that attract and repel. I poked around, trying to avoid the piles of clean underpants with their disgusting flies. When I found the shoe box, it looked innocent enough. I opened it, hoping to find something exciting, a condom or diet pills. Instead, there was a pile of yellowed newspaper clippings. On top, there was a black and white snapshot from the fifties. It showed a dark-haired woman standing and shading her eyes beneath an ambiguous lump of mountain.

  In the first clipping, a blond woman was trying to hide her face from the cameras. The headline from the Albuquerque Journal read Motherhood Obsessed Her and Suspect Arraigned. I looked into the eyes of the suspect. She was wearing a red chiffon kerchief, the cheap kind, from Woolworth’s. Somehow I knew it was red. She had a sad ordinary face. I began to like her. She had wanted me that badly.

  Suddenly, I thought I heard someone coming down the hall. Quickly I replaced the box and took off the paisley tie. But when I opened the closet door, the room was still empty. Still, I didn’t go back in there. I didn’t think I could read those clippings alone.

  Since we were grounded, school became my only entertainment. I was doing well in everything except for geometry. Those chalky triangles affected me like the bite of the tsetse fly. Also, the teacher was Mr. Love, with his incomprehensible Scottish accent. Mr. Love had a fiery red mustache and a scraggly beard. In our all-girls school, he was not a figure of romance but one alternately of comedy and terror. Every time he drew on the board, I was overcome with a vague sensation of vertigo. Even the mysterious glyphs in the textbook made me sleepy. Mr. Love would yell, “I am going to inject ye with a gramophone needle,” whenever any girl gave a wrong answer. The almost phallic suggestion and the word gramophone invariably reduced us to hysterics.

  Monique and I sat prominently in the front row. Monique’s theory was that our grades would improve if we sat up front, showing our interest and perhaps a tiny bit of cleavage. And so I gazed soulfully at the board and at Mr. Love’s mustache, hoping this would make up for the fact that I had no ideas at all about the square root of the hypotenuse, whatever that might be.

  It was a Tuesday; it was raining. Pigeons walked under the brick eaves, casting elegant shadows on the drawn shades of the room. A postcard of a Japanese lady, pasted on the cover of my loose leaf notebook, showed a woman in a pale green kimono gazing moon-faced into a hand mirror. Whatever beauty there was in the world was not to be found under the buzz of the yellow fluorescent lights in math class.

  Meanwhile, the porno novel inched its way towards me. This novel, passed from hand to hand, was being written by the whole geometry class. I peeked over at the girl sitting demurely to my left. She was writing, in her smooth private school cursive: “John put Maggie’s pale pink nipple between his lips. Her underpants were soaking wet. Slowly his fingers crawled up the inside of her…”

  Then she passed the notebook to me. The problem was that we had already written twenty-six pages of foreplay. No one dared to write to consummation; perhaps no one knew how. I took out my pink pen and continued, “… up the inside of her creamy white thigh.” I liked that; adjectives could take up a lot of space. “ ‘Oh John,’ Maggie moaned, ‘that feels good, but if only…’” Then I passed the notebook as discreetly as I could to Monique.

  Monique had been in a bad mood all week. Her skin was broken out and being grounded made her frantic, not that she had any place in particular to go. Writing so large I could read it, Monique added: “ ‘if only I had an anchovy pizza right now. I’m so hungry, I just can’t think about anything else. But if you’ll order a pizza, John, I promise I’ll suck you off, moving my tongue ever so slowly…’”

  And so Monique passed the porno novel on to the next person. For all her boasting, even Monique couldn’t write the climax. A wave of affection washed over me as I watched her chew the eraser off a number two pencil and try to bisect something with her protractor. Her hair was so yellow. And her thick nubby eyelashes cast the palest of purple shadows on her cheekbones.

  I had completely lost the train of what Mr. Love was saying. There were only fifteen minutes left in the period anyway. So I wrote Monique a note on a little piece of paper: “Hi!” it said, “We need more vocabulary words for this novel. List the words for vagina.”

  In two minutes, Monique passed me back a crumpled note: cunt

  slit

  crack

  hairy clam

  ring

  This last one was from Shakespeare; we had been reading The Merchant of Venice in English class. Neither Monique nor I thought it was very nice about the Jews. And why did the girl have to convert at the end? It seemed mean. Wasn’t it usually the other way around? After all, Monique’s mother had converted to Judaism to marry her father. It made no sense.

  To Monique’s list I added:

  pussy

  twat

  snatch beaver pubes

  Then I tried to pass the note back to her. But suddenly Mr. Love was standing over us.

  “Gerls,” he crooned, “what’s in the note?
And does it pertain to trigonometry?”

  “Yes!” we chorused.

  “I’d like to see your solution to the problem.”

  But as slowly as he reached out his hand to take the note, Monique snatched it from me in one smooth motion and popped it effortlessly into her mouth. She did not pause to chew, but swallowed the note whole. Down her white throat and into darkness went the list of all the words we knew for vagina:

  cunt

  slit

  crack

  hairy clam

  ring

  pussy

  twat

  snatch

  beaver

  pubes

  The room must have been absolutely silent, because suddenly I could hear everyone breathing again. The girl to whom the porno novel had been passed quickly stashed it under her copy of The Red Badge of Courage. Mr. Love gave us all an even look of disgust and went back to his hieroglyphics on the board, only turning once to say, “Aye, gerls, gerls, I’m going to inject all of ye with a gramophone needle.”

  Monique looked soulfully into space. She crossed and uncrossed her legs so that the plaid uniform rode up on her thighs. Still, Monique had swallowed all those words. After class, I touched her gently on the shoulder.

  “Are you all right?”

  “Sure! My quick thinking saved the day.”

  “Quick eating!” I said. “How did you ever figure that move out?”

  “I always know when it’s time to leave,” said Monique.

  “How do you know?”

  “It depends on what you’re planning to leave. A party? Home? A peace rally?”

  “Oh, a rally.”

  “That’s easy. About five minutes before they start tear gassing everybody. Just go get a hamburger or something and a cup of coffee.”

  “How do you know when to leave a party, then?”

  “Are you making out or not making out?”

  “Not making out.”

  “When they turn out the lights.”

  “Okay, making out then.”

  “Don’t leave,” said Monique.

  “Not ever?”

  “Not until you’ve been felt up properly.”

  I believed her, of course. I always believed her.

  “What about a friend?” I asked.

  “What about a friend?”

  “When should you leave a friend?”

  “You should never leave a friend,” said Monique flatly.

  “But what if the friend is mean? What if the friend steals your boyfriend or goes somewhere and doesn’t invite you? What if the friend smokes dope at your house and gets you into trouble? What if the friend insults your new dangling earrings and says they are ugly? What if the friend…”

  “No way,” said Monique. “It doesn’t matter. No way do you leave. A friend is the one person you don’t leave. That’s what makes her a friend.”

  I wasn’t sure Monique should have saved us by eating that list. As a child, I was careful to spit out watermelon seeds, nectarine pits, even the cores of apples. I was afraid of something sprouting inside me, growing, choking me as it groped towards the light and out my mouth. I wondered if Monique had swallowed a complete list, or if there were more words we didn’t know. After that, I began to watch her a little more closely.

  CHAPTER 6

  I WAS NOT A COMPLETE FOOL. I knew that Monique was bossy and pushy and that in order to be happy she had to get her own way all the time. I knew that she was prettier than I was, but that I was smarter. And I did know quite a few things that Monique had not taught me. I knew, for example, never to play the shell game in the street, not the Cuban shell game nor the Italian shell game or any other game that involved three overturned paper cups and a penny. I knew you could not win. I knew never to put money into a pyramid scheme, not to wash whites and colored clothes together, and never to let a boy come in my mouth. I don’t know how I knew these things, certainly my mother and father had never taught me outright. But still I knew them.

  Like every high school girl in New Jersey, I had what purported to be Paul Newman’s telephone credit card number, and I was prepared to use it. I knew that you should never look in the mirror while tripping on LSD. I knew that if you played a certain Beatles’ song backward it said Paul is dead, Paul is dead. I knew that you could use a tampon and still be a virgin. I knew that it wasn’t fair for men to boss women around all the time. I knew how to take off my bra without taking off my shirt, by slipping the straps down under the blouse’s sleeves. I knew how to make chili with black olives and nutmeg in it. But the truth was that it was Monique who had taught me that.

  There were also things I did not know, things contained in a shoe box in my father’s cedar closet. The next time my parents went to the movies and my little brothers were playing knock hockey, I stepped into the master bedroom, pausing only for a moment at the threshold.

  The Persian carpet felt plushy under my bare feet. Grace had good taste, not New Jersey taste. The room was subdued, with cream trim and pale blue wallpaper with a faint floral design. Grace read decorating magazines, but she did not leave them out on the coffee table because that would be in bad taste. Books were good taste. Crushed velvet couches, like those at Monique’s house, were bad taste. Grace’s only nod to a more exotic kind of taste was her obsession with rugs. The polished floorboards of her living room were covered in rugs, including one huge old one that my father claimed was worth more than the house itself.

  I turned on the light in my father’s walk-in closet and crept in, closing the door behind me. I went straight to the shoe box, but I didn’t open it right away. I smelled ash and something like old blood, or onions frying. I wanted to smoke a cigarette, but I was afraid the smoke would linger. Then I took the top off the shoe box and touched clippings, brittle as old leaves.

  Just touching the fragile print started a movie running in my head. What I didn’t know, my imagination provided. I could see the scenes unfold before me.

  When my real mother was eight-and-a-half months pregnant, she went for her prenatal check-up with the obstetrician on the base. She was already a centimeter dilated, and her hips swayed loosely as she walked. She wore a blue smock with white flowers and a pair of sandals; her ankles were slightly swollen but it was nothing to be alarmed about, just the usual edema.

  My mother’s sunglasses were pushed up over her dark hair. In the parking lot, the asphalt shimmered in the heat. My mother held the car keys to the second-hand Oldsmobile in her hand. Behind her, shapeless lumpy mountains were as dry as Armenia. Quite suddenly, my mother wished she hadn’t left her gold cross on the gold chain in a white saucer on her bedroom bureau. She was thirsty. She thought about iced tea or cola.

  Then she saw the gun. My other mother was holding the gun. My mother looked at the frowzy blond in a gray housecoat and dirty white sneakers and thought, Poor woman, I wonder what she wants; I wonder what is the matter with her. I, Rania, was still unnamed inside the womb. I didn’t have legs that could run or a voice that could scream for help in English. I needed someone else to do these things for me. My mother did none of these things, however. She simply froze. She was like someone who is afraid of dogs and suddenly sees two Dobermans coming down a deserted road. She was like someone who looks at the algebra problem on the test with complete incomprehension. This was not what she had studied; this was not what she had prepared for. So she stood there, still underneath the mountain.

  The blond with the gun pushed my mother into the passenger seat of the car and took the wheel herself. She drove coolly, with precision, out of the parking lot, down Central Avenue, past the shanty end of town, and up into the Manzano mountains. My mother made no attempt to escape. She did not roll down the window and yell, or throw her sunglasses where someone might find them, or hurl herself and me out of the moving vehicle. She did not even put on her seat belt; she was too big for that now. It was as if, after all that waiting, she had finally gone into labor. There was nothing for it but to endure,
and wait to be delivered.

  When the car stopped, they were at eight thousand feet. The air was resinous with spruce and pine. It was too late for many spring wildflowers, but some Indian paintbrushes grew red and spiky by an old tire. The blond pushed my mother out of the car and onto a bed of pine needles. Then, in the next minute, she strangled her. It was an almost effortless motion with the sash of her housecoat. Then she took a red Swiss army knife out of her pocket and gently split open my mother’s womb. She lifted me out of the red flood, unwrinkled as a Caesar. And so I was born on the mountain top, under the sign of the Crab, July 6, 1954, Albuquerque, New Mexico.

  The screen inside my head went blank. I was shaking in my father’s closet. I felt as if I was going to vomit. I put the clippings back in the box and backed out of the closet. I went into my parents’ bathroom and hung my head over the toilet bowl and spit up a little bit of green bile. Then I flushed the toilet, put some toothpaste on my finger, and scoured the taste out of my mouth. I went to the hall telephone and dialed Monique’s number. It was busy.

  I did know some things that Monique had not told me. I knew that the full moon brought on a period, and that babies were born then, too. I knew a blond should not wear black mascara. I knew that hooch and bone and doober were names for a joint. I dialed the number again. Monique’s mother picked up the phone.

  “Hello.”