Warpaint (8 page)

He closed his eyes, and rested his temple against the car window. “Do you? Must I share you, always, with her?”

“What do you mean by share, Luke?”

“You know perfectly well what I mean.”

“Listen,” she said, although she'd said it before. “I am
in love
with you. In love. With you. I love C.C. I am not in love with her.”

“You were once, weren't you?”

“Maybe,” she said, biting her lip. “We had sex. We lived together. You know this. You knew this when you married me. But I was a kid! Just out of college, green as corn. I didn't know what I wanted and besides it was a long time ago.”

Luke ran his index finger slowly along the window edge. “It's hard,” he said after a few minutes. “Maybe if I weren't sick, I wouldn't care so much, I don't know. I didn't care when I proposed to you. I swear I didn't.
So what?
I thought because by the time you get to be our age, if you haven't fallen once or twice for the wrong one, well, that's not a surprise. But now, when there's no future –”

Quiola caught her breath. “Honey, none of knows if we have a future.”

“Oh, sure, we could both get hit by the next crazy on this highway. Right. I know. Hey, let's stop at the beach first. I mean before we get to the house. It's a beautiful day. I'd like to sit by the water.”

“I'm there before you,” she said, smiling. “I packed us a lunch.”

The sun seemed desirous of shining hard as if just for Luke, who soon fell into a doze and only woke again when Quiola swung off the ramp, through the stoplight and into the park. Off-season, no guard was on duty; the winding road of marsh and tide was empty; dry, burst cattails shook in the light, chill wind. The parking lot, too, was empty and the winter beach entirely theirs. Draping his alpaca throw across his shoulders, Luke let Quiola help him out of the passenger seat, and together, with their lunch in a red cooler and a heavy woolen Pendleton blanket, made their way across the weathered boardwalk, to the sand.

The grayish Sound, so much calmer than its cousin the Atlantic, rippled quietly a few yards from their picnic. They didn't speak as Quiola unpacked lunch, but when she handed Luke his wax-papered egg-salad sandwich and bag of chips, he said, “I will die soon, you know. I feel it in me, Qui. I feel… different. Lighter.”

She could not take his gaze with her own, so kept her eyes on the sandwich they both held. “I don't want you to leave me,” she said. “Don't.”

“Oh, no,” he said, his voice suddenly Luke's old voice, real, firm, and warm. “Are you kidding me? Not when there's egg salad and chips!”

 

♦

 

At Liz's suggestion – her insistence, really – when C.C.'s chemo treatment ended, Quiola took a break: a week in New York, talking to gallery people about a possible show for C.C.; two weeks in Paris, closing up the studio cleaning it out, making it buyer-ready.

“By the time you get back, I'll be well,” said C.C., watching Quiola haul a black nylon suitcase out the back of the closet; she put it on the bed, unzipped it. Amelia leapt up from the floor to investigate.

“Promise?” asked Quiola as she rummaged in the bag.

“Yes. By then, the radiation will be done – hey, what have you found in there?”

“An old postcard.”

“What does it say?”

“Nothing. It's blank. But it's – here, look,” and she handed it over to C.C.

“It this a joke?”

The lurid red, green and beige card was titled
INDIAN SYMBOLS
 in bright red, bold capital letters; it was subtitled
And Their Meanings
in lower-case brown type. An illustration of a Hollywood-type Native American in red-feathered war-bonnet was super-imposed on what seemed to be a dried buffalo hide. Written on that hide were tiny black symbols followed by English interpretations:

 

 

 

 

 

 

“Might be a joke,” said Quiola. “It could also be, well, just American kitsch. The colors and typeface look fifties, but I think the card's a replica.”

“Where'd you get it?”

“Somewhere in Paris.”

“Says here it was published by Petley Studios, Albuquerque, N.M.”

“Helpful.”

“Why did you buy it?”

Quiola put her hand out for the card, and smiled. “Because it's so awful. And because it's so – so –” she shrugged. “So American.” She folded the card inside a shirt. “I was homesick. When I found the card, it made me laugh, so I tacked it up over my desk – I know, it's weird. But in Paris, it seemed less so. I mean, whenever I'd run across another American – even a loud, fraternity kid – I'd practically throw myself at them because I
am
American. I'll never really be anything else. Even if I know that postcard is twisted, just plain wrong, I also think it's typical, so American.”

“I see what you mean. Like those shops you find near a beach or a lake somewhere, Indian Trading Post. Genuine Indian trinkets.”

“Yeah. I was confused by those places, as a kid. I also wanted the doll and her papoose. Mother eventually broke down and bought me one, but she also taught me how to bead the old-fashioned way, so I could make myself, and my doll, more beautiful things that the crappy stuff it came with.”

“I've never seen you bead, or even wear anything beaded.”

Quiola sat down on her bed next to the suitcase. “No. I haven't done that since I was a teenager. I stopped because everybody back then wore beaded flower necklaces. It was the '70s, after all. Flower power. I remember, though, one Halloween, I dressed up like what I thought an Indian Princess would look like, and I made a beaded headdress but that pained Mother so, the next year I was a flapper. I had a straight white dress with fringes all over it, and an elastic headband with a feather in front – my Indian princess headdress from the Halloween before, worn backwards and covered in gold sequins. That was first time my Mother let me wear makeup like a real woman, with the lipstick and the eye-shadow where they were supposed to go. I had worn lipstick a few Halloweens before, when I was really little, but it was in a straight line from the side of my mouth to my chin–blood dripping down the side of a young vampire's face. Anyway, flower-power, when it took over, never appealed to me. I didn't want to be a flower child. I wanted to be a robot.”

“A robot? Seriously?”

“Seriously. It would be cool to be mechanical. So lean and chrome. Looking back, I suppose it was self-defense. A robot can't get hurt.”

“It can break down.”

“Of course, but they can also be fixed, like a toaster or a car. That's what I thought. But even mechanical things sometimes can't be fixed.”

“Like the Heap. Like me.”

Quiola rested her hand on top of the suitcase and gave C.C. a look that said, without speaking:
and this is why I have to leave, for now. When you say things like that
.

“Well? It's the truth, isn't it? I'll never be entirely the same.”

Quiola stared at the wood floor, silent.

“Goddamn it, Quiola. Can't we even talk about this? I'm not the same, I'll never be the same, and there's no guarantee I'll even make it. You ask me to promise to get well, but you can't really ask me, for your sake, to believe in a miracle, can you? You can't just ignore the fact that I've been bent, spindled and mutilated, that I'm sick, and that you're leaving.”

“I'm not leaving, leaving. I'm coming back. Three weeks.”

“Fine! I stand corrected. I'll be alone for three weeks.”

“But you won't be alone! There's Margaret next door, and then Valerie will be here – and you said you'd be all right, you said it was a good idea! I can cancel my trip –”

“No. That would be a mistake.” She glanced up warily. “For both of us.”

“Yes, it would. I need to get – I'm sorry, C.C. I need a break. I'm not perfect.”

“Neither am I,” said C.C. quietly. “Neither am I.”

 

♦

 

“Mom.” Her long, thick dark hair in a single braid down her back, Quiola stood solemn, a point of stillness in her blue Catholic school uniform. The cramped kitchen bustled, as the first wave of the dinner hour swung into tempo at
Rose Garden.
Tucked into a corner of the Lower East Side, the tiny restaurant had grown hot as a furnace with local traffic. Rose Otter turned away from the gas stove she'd been supervising at the sound of her daughter's voice. A spry woman, Rose Otter was just thirty; her employees called her Mrs. Dynamo.

“What is it, Quiola? You can see how busy we are. Why don't you go upstairs and start on homework? Then come back in an hour or to help us out. Tonight looks like a rush already. But then it is Friday –”

“Mom, I – I don't feel well.”

Rose frowned. She touched the shoulder of the woman standing at the stove beside her. “Britta? Can you handle this by yourself?”

“Sure, no problem – it's early yet. Go on.”

Rose wiped her hands on her chef's apron, and laid a palm against Quiola's forehead, her gaze full of concern. “I don't think you're running a fever.”

“No, it's not like that,” said Quiola lowering her voice to no more than a whisper, which got lost in the clamor of pots, flares, chopping, dicing, the fragrance of onion and garlic, vegetables simmering, meat sizzling.

“Hey,” said Rose to a young man. “Watch how much of that oil you use! I'm not Mrs. Gotrocks, ya know! So tell me, Quiola, how don't you feel well?”

“I'm sick.”

“To your stomach?”

“Not exactly. Maybe. Please, Mom, can't we talk about this upstairs?”

“Have you lost your mind? Do you see what's going on here, hmm? Dinner. I can't just leave and you know it. Quiola, honey, what is wrong with you? Do you have a headache? I don't think it can be flu, you aren't running a fever and you don't look flushed.”

“Order up, number nine!” cried Britta. “Now, George!”

“Never mind,” said Quiola. “I'll go up and lay down.”

“Do you think aspirin would help?”

Quiola gave her mother a tragic look. “No.”

“Honest to Peter, Quiola, why won't you tell me what's wrong?”

“I can't. Not here.”

Rose folded her arms and looked her daughter over. “All right, then, let's go. Britta? Be back in five?”

“No problem, boss.”

Nodding, Rose threaded her way through the orchestra of preparation that was her restaurant's kitchen ballet, to a set of back stairs that led to her apartment. Quiola followed, watching her mother's small back and slightly hunched shoulders, wondering how to say, how to tell her mother what she knew: she was dying.

Once they'd gotten inside, and the noise from below muted to a distant rumble, Rose felt her daughter's forehead again, and took a bottle of aspirin out of a kitchen shelf. She filled a glass from the tap, gestured for Quiola to sit at the little kitchen table beside an open window, and sat opposite to her. “All right, honey. Tell me. What's wrong?”

Quiola shook her head, then lowered it, to stare at her feet.

Rose waited. After a few more tense moments she said. “It's not a boy. Tell me it's not a boy? Not that no-good Romero you went around with last year?”

“Mom, we were just friends. He's funny.”

“Funny or crazy. Depends on how you look at it but I say friends like that one you don't need.”

“Well it's not him. It's not a boy. You've warned me a thousand times –”

“With good reason. You don't need to make the same mistake I did.”

“Fine. That's not it, anyway – I – I think I'm dying.”

“You think… for heaven's sake, Quiola what a thing to say to your mother! Why do you think you're dying?”

“I'm bleeding and it won't stop. I've soaked right through the toilet paper I stuffed…up…there…I'm dying, Mama. I couldn't tell the nuns – it's too awful to be bleeding….”

“Down there? Oh, sweetheart, it's all right. You're fine! You're not dying, you're just growing up. Don't you remember I told you about the flower – the monthlies. I told you it would probably start soon, just a few weeks ago.”

Quiola stared. “But you said it would just be a little – not like this, I'm
bleeding.
”

Rose stood up. “I thought you would be like me, a little trickle at first. But of course we aren't all the same. Some of us start with a flood. Your grandmother did – but she had her old-fashioned ways of handling it, and said it just made her proud. Proud! Of the curse? Let me get you what you need – you've seen my pads, haven't you?”

“Curse?”

Rose turned around. “Don't you think so? Most of my friends call it the curse. A mess like that, every month and for what? To have a baby – thank god you're bleeding and not pregnant is all I have to say.”