After checking it in and out again and again, with many renewals in between, and then finding a paperback edition at a yard sale, Caridad returned the library’s copy of Madame Bovary with reluctance in late April. As she ran its punch card through the reader at the front desk, poor Emma and the dullard Charles flashed in her mind’s eye as if they were aboard a ship pulling away from a dock where she stood waving. Emma, though sharply described by Flaubert, was less fixed in Caridad’s imagination, but Charles appeared to her in a distinctive way. Le Docteur Bovary, as she pictured him, resembled Jorge, minus the beard. So when she glanced up at Jorge himself, now beardless and standing at the check-out desk, Caridad experienced a prickly sensation, as if she’d conjured his presence.
“Long time no see. How’ve you been?” The words sped out of Jorge’s mouth, as if recited by rote. Clean-shaven, his pimply jowls bulged like a hamster’s stuffed with seeds.
“Has Noah . . .” She patted her face. “Did he shave, too?”
“You think I can’t do anything on my own?”
At this, Caridad knew that Noah had likewise razored off his beard. Jorge set a file sleeve on the desk. “I just need you to sign some stuff.” Caridad looked to see where Fakhri, the desk supervisor, might be lurking.
“You don’t have to do it now,” Jorge said. “Go over everything. Sign the places I marked and mail it to me in that stamped envelope I included.”
She took the folder and slid it onto the shelf under the desk where she kept her purse and a copy of Bullfinch’s Mythology. Then Caridad leaned toward Jorge. “How are you?”
“I met someone,” he said, his lips barely moving. “It’s serious, so I’ll need to get those forms pretty quick.”
Caridad drew back. “Okay.”
Jorge’s face softened, and he said, “How’s your mom?”
“She’s fine.”
“I always liked her. She’s cool people.”
“She’s fond of you, too,” Caridad said. Mama still asked after Jorge, ever hopeful they might reconcile.
“And your sisters—how are they?”
“They’re fine. In fact, I’m about to become an aunt. Esperanza’s having labor induced this afternoon. After work, I’m heading straight to the hospital.”
“What hospital? I’d like to send flowers or something.”
“Manzanita Vista in Sylmar.” Caridad smiled. How thoughtful Jorge could be. No wonder her mother missed him. “But she won’t be checking in until four.”
“Thanks for letting me know,” he said. “Don’t forget to sign that stuff, okay?” Jorge pivoted away from the desk. For a thickset man, he took long and swift steps toward the glass doors before disappearing into a flash of sunlight.
Gray was late picking her up after work. Squinting, Caridad stood near the temporary parking, an oblong paved area with metered slots. She checked her wristwatch as if this would speed up his arrival. A gaggle of Asian students wandered past, and two library coworkers—Kitty Fu and Phuoc Phong—lifted hands in greeting. Caridad waved back. They followed a fluffy dog, a gingery mutt being hectored by a pair of sparrows that dove at the dog, snatching at its fur. With each assault, the dog whipped around to snap at the birds.
“Birds steal dog feathers,” Kitty Fu called to her.
“Fur,” Caridad said. “It’s called fur.”
Kitty smiled. “See you later.” Phuoc echoed this, and the group continued toward the bus stop. The dog spun as the sparrows swooped, baring teeth and barking now. The birds wheeled away before circling back to pluck more tufts when the dog continued trotting.
Gray would be interested in this. He would reach for the notebook he kept for scribbling observations in his tiny, unreadable scrawl. He might even construct a haiku with these bare ingredients. Anyone else would want to know the significance of this. Not Gray. He didn’t care whether things had points or not. In his back pocket, he still kept Naked Lunch, a book Caridad found unreadable for its vagaries. Gray also enjoyed books that were sequential and clear, as long as these were in some way confounding. Since their world literature course, Voltaire’s Candide had become a favorite of his, and he often quoted paradoxical observations from the novel. When things went awry, he’d say, “Private misfortunes make the public good, and so the more private misfortunes there are, the more all is well.” Or he’d say, “If this is the best of all possible worlds, what are the others like?”
Gray appreciated things that were not what they seemed. “You’re really not a nice person,” he’d once told Caridad. “Your voice is quiet and your touch is gentle, but you’re not that nice at all. I like that.” Caridad, who considered niceness a bland affliction, had beamed at this. He liked that she wore a stained baseball cap of his when they worked together in the yard, and he would sometimes call her “Daddy,” a nickname derived from the last syllable of her name. Gray claimed that balanced people had both masculine and feminine energy, and he said she had good masculine energy.
Once when Caridad awoke from a nap, dazed and dream-bleary, she’d mumbled, “I love you more than ten thousand cans of mushroom soup poured all over the rug.” And Gray, amber eyes gleaming, had opened his notebook to record her words. No, Gray was not like other people, and this was probably why he was late. He’d likely stopped on the way to write in his notebook or to collect something strange that had been set out as trash. Maybe he’d lost track of time. Gray wasn’t good with time.
Luckily, she had Bullfinch to keep her company. Caridad opened the book to where she’d left off: Juno discovering Jupiter in the company of an exquisite heifer. Caridad struggled to imagine this striking cow. All cattle—though limpid eyed and velvety muzzled—were rather plain and blocky. She was envisioning a tawny bovine with glossy lashes, though, when Gray’s car rumbled curbside. “Hey, baby,” he said through the opened window. “Need a ride?”
“That depends.” She closed her book. “Where you headed, big boy?”
Gray swung open the passenger-side door and Caridad slid in. He kissed her wetly. “You’ll never guess what I found in the Dumpster behind Woolworth’s.”
Jupiter or Jove doubled as Zeus, and Juno, a.k.a. Hera, was his wife. Venus was the Roman version of Aphrodite, and Cupid became Eros for the Greeks. In the hospital’s waiting area with Gray, Esperanza’s friends, and Felicia, Caridad longed for index cards to keep track of the many gods. She should also make cards for the Titans and non-Titans, as well as the demigods, beasts, and numerous relevant mortals that kept cropping up. It was not enough to highlight the names; there were too many of these for that, and telling Gray the myths proved useless. His recollection was so poor that strolling down Memory Lane for him would be like wandering about on some strange planet. Now he sat among Esperanza’s friends—Delfina, Viviana, and Raven—as they recounted childbirth experiences.
Esperanza’s friends were telling where they were when their water broke, what they said when begging for anesthesia, and how they coped in the aftermath of the inevitable episiotomy. “Donut pillows,” Raven was saying, and Delfina added, “Hemorrhoid cream.” These women liked him. Even Felicia had to admit Gray wasn’t that bad. He now winced as Viviana complained that her milk didn’t come in for four days. “The third day, my chi-chis were like boulders, and they hurt. I’m talking killer-diller pain.”
Caridad glanced from Gray to Felicia, who was seated on a turquoise vinyl chair, a stack of papers on her lap. Felicia, now a student teacher, was marking work by fifth graders with a purple pen. Their mother, Esperanza’s birthing coach, was in the delivery room. Who knew where Reynaldo was? He’d claimed that being present for the birth might ruin marital relations for him, but Esperanza explained to her sisters that the sight of blood caused him to faint.
Caridad was squinting at Felicia’s marks on a paper, hoping these were not too brutal, when commotion at the door drew her attention. Jorge and Geraldine barged in to the waiting room, trailed by Noah, who had, as she’d suspected, shaved off his rust-colored beard, revealing a pale nub of chin. Caridad blinked and shook her head as if to clear her vision of the unexpected and unwanted interlopers.
“Where is she?” Geraldine asked Caridad. The large woman wore aqua scrubs. A gauze mask dangled from her neck. Braless as usual, her pendulous breasts hung over her stomach, calling to mind the netted sacks that held volleyballs in Caridad’s gym class.
“Who?” The atmosphere tightened, filling Caridad’s ears with pressure. Esperanza’s friends went mute, their eyes round, and Gray drew knees to his chest. Felicia, though, stood and strode forth, papers sailing to the floor. She clenched the purple pen in one fist like a blade.
“Esperanza,” Geraldine said. “She said I could assist with the birth.”
Standing on either side of her, Noah and Jorge glanced about, examining furniture, framed prints, and plastic potted plants, as if fascinated by the room’s décor.
Felicia stepped closer to Geraldine, causing her to backpedal. “You’re full of shit,” she said, lifting Geraldine’s bangs with a huff of breath.
Geraldine’s face pinkened. “I have training as a birth coach. I’m taking courses in reproductive science at West Valley Occupational—” “But that’s animal husbandry,” Caridad said. She’d seen brochures for the program at Geraldine’s. “My sister’s not livestock.”
Felicia shoved Geraldine’s shoulders, rocking her back another step. “Get out before I throw you out.”
“That’s assault,” Geraldine said. “I could have you arrested, but I’ll let it go if—”
Advancing, Felicia backed Geraldine toward the door.
“These premises,” Noah began, “are open to the public—”
Caridad turned to Jorge. “This is what you do?”
Esperanza’s friends rose to converge on the intruders, chorusing Felicia: “Go on! Get out!” Gray watched, wearing a stricken expression.
A security guard, a monolithic Samoan who’d earlier helped Caridad and Gray with directions, now appeared in the corridor. “What’s going on?”
“These people,” Felicia said, “are leaving.”
Geraldine opened her mouth, but Noah tugged her arm. Jorge had already stepped over the threshold, his rounded back receding into the corridor.
“I’ll take you to the exit,” the guard said. “It’s easy to lose your way. This place is a maze.” Jorge, Noah, and Geraldine trailed after the guard. Felicia, hands on hips, stood at the threshold, watching to make sure they departed.
As soon as they’d all settled back into their seats, Caridad’s mother shuffled through the door, wearing—like Geraldine—aqua scrubs. Her face shone with perspiration, as if she had been the one to give birth. “It’s a girl,” she said. “I have a granddaughter.”
“Uh-oh,” Caridad blurted out. Reynaldo had been counting on a son. Planning to call the baby Reynaldo Jr., he and Esperanza hadn’t even considered a girl’s name.
Felicia shot her a sharp look. “Is Espie okay? Is the baby okay?”
“Everyone’s fine.” Mama turned to Caridad. “She wants to see you, m’ija.”
“What about me?” Felicia said. “When do I get to see the baby?”
Mama patted Felicia’s arm. “You’re next.”
“Dah-Dah.” Esperanza grabbed Caridad’s hand, pulling her close. The briny odor of blood penetrated the room’s sharp astringent smell. The light was off, the shades drawn. Esperanza’s face shone, blanched as a hothouse orchid. “They’re bringing the baby in a bit, and I want you to hold her first.” Her tongue traced her cracked lips.
“Can I get you water?”
Esperanza’s eyes flickered with impatience. “Listen, Dah-Dah, this is important. I want you to hold her. You’re going to be the godmother. If anything happens—”
“Me?”
“You know Mama’s not well, and Felicia . . . Felicia’s too hard. It has to be you, Dah-Dah. If anything happens, I want you—”
“Nothing’s going to happen.” Caridad drew back, but Esperanza’s fingers bit into her palm.
“I want you. Not Mama, not Felicia.” Her voice dropped to a harsh whisper. “And not Reynaldo.”
“Sure, of course.” With a free hand, Caridad stroked her sister’s matted hair.
Esperanza licked her lips again. “What will we name her?”
“Minerva,” Caridad said in a flash, “for the goddess of wisdom.”
“Minerva, I like that.”
Later, while her sister rested, Caridad held the snugly bundled infant in her arms as she stood before the window. The small face was the color of turkey wattle with puffy seams for eyes. An island of hair, a single black tuft, crowned her lumpy head. She smelled of cooked carrots and stewing beef. Her grotesqueness was startling. Still, Caridad beamed at Esperanza as if the creature she’d produced was not too monstrous. The baby’s appalling face, in fact, compelled Caridad’s gaze. Brakes shrieked on the street below. Horns blared. But Caridad could not look away from her exquisitely hideous niece. “Minerva,” she said. “Minerva.”
Weeks later, while Caridad stood at the Laurel Canyon kiosk worrying that she’d missed the Vanowen bus, she envisioned herself speaking to someone neutral, say a psychiatrist or a judge. She would say it all started in bed that morning and then tell how she’d gathered a hank of her boyfriend’s hair to tug it back, ponytail style. “You’d make a pretty girl,” she said, and he’d replied, “Funny you should mention that . . .” No, no, no. Caridad peered down the smog-shrouded boulevard. It started long before that, with blouses hung inside out, with inexpert gouges in her blushing powder, with beige dribs—foundation cream?—speckling the bathroom sink. It began with missing pantyhose. It really started with the wig.
Caridad stepped off the curb for a broader view of the hazy intersection. At last, a rectangular form shimmered in the distance. The bus loomed near, so densely thronged with passengers that Caridad worried the driver wouldn’t stop. But brakes keening, it sailed alongside the curb, wheezing a noxious gust in her face.
Caridad climbed aboard, clanked quarters into the coin box. The haggard driver’s gray eyes were filmy and vacant, giving him the look of an exasperated Tiresias about to impart some appalling truth about her destiny.
She wedged past many standing passengers. The bus lurched, and Caridad staggered. She grabbed an overhead strap near a double seat occupied by a bubble-haired brunette whose purse occupied the cushion beside her. Did the woman not notice all the travelers tethered to hand-straps, standing for the duration of their ride? The brunette wore a red smock with a convenience store’s insignia on it, and her hair was teased and sprayed to a lackluster finish, like the preserved pelt of a deceased pet. Caridad dropped her gaze to the woman’s jetbead clutch—a stingy little bag. The brunette smoothed her hair. Caridad flashed on the bewigged Styrofoam head she’d found in the closet, a faceless ovoid also wearing lusterless brown hair. Everything should have started with that cap of synthetic hair, if only she’d known how to interpret it. Gray kept so many odd things in the closet that it was hard to tell what each object meant.
He had several shelves filled with objects he intended to render one day, such as a cow’s femur, coconut shells, carapaces of oversized insects, rusted horseshoes, a mannequin’s hand, a stringless ukulele, a canister of buttons, a limp carrot that bifurcated in a way that suggested legs leisurely crossed at the ankles. She’d assumed he planned to sketch the wig, though it and the Styrofoam head were the only objects in his collection that were not furred with dust. That, along with the odd-turned clothing and missing hosiery, should have prompted her to ask a few shrewd questions.
Now the brunette reached for the beaded bag, and Caridad prepared to sink into the seat. But the woman just opened it to fish out a tube of lipstick.
“Excuse me,” Caridad said. “Your purse is taking up a whole seat.”
“Yeah, so?” the brunette said.
“If you hold it in your lap, someone else could sit down.”
“What if I want to sit by myself?”
“What about . . . common courtesy?” Caridad hadn’t expected the woman to argue for her selfishness. How indefensible was that?
“What about minding your own business?”
Quaking, Caridad was preparing to embrace this suggestion, when someone else spoke up. “Move that thing.” The voice was a thin tenor, clearly masculine. It was the Library Rat, now standing behind her.
Caridad divided up fellow bus passengers into two categories: those who irritated her due to noisiness or hygiene and those she didn’t mind much. Though Caridad privately dubbed him the Library Rat, he easily fell into the latter category. He wore his blond hair greased back, baring his rodent face—narrow nose, pink-rimmed eyes, longish yellowed teeth, and recessed chin. Reading one book or another, he often rode the bus with Caridad in the morning. He’d exit at the Vanowen Branch Library, which they were soon to approach.
“Mind your own business,” Selfish Brunette called over her shoulder.
The pull-cord buzzed, and the Library Rat stepped closer. He was scrawnier than Caridad had thought, but paunchy under his worn white T-shirt.
The woman snatched up her purse. “Satisfied?”
As the bus hauled to a stop, Caridad tumbled into the seat. The Library Rat exited from the middle door. From the window, she watched him march, book in hand, toward the library as if following orders to report for duty.
Of course, since the first bus was delayed, she missed her transfer on Reseda Boulevard, the bus that would deliver her to campus. Its funnel cloud of exhaust spumed a few blocks up ahead. She would again be late for Greek and Roman Mythology. The professor—an ex-military something or other—used a sign-in sheet for attendance. When she was late, Caridad had to approach him after class to ask humbly for the roll sheet. Each time, he’d been uncharmed by her soft voice and shy smile. Last week, the professor had sarcastically asked if she’d had trouble finding a parking space again. Remembering this, Caridad winced. But at least now, while she waited for another bus, she could replay what Gray had told her that morning in bed.
“I like to dress up,” he’d said, after she told him he would make a pretty girl.
“You do?” Bafflement descended on her like a stage curtain that she had to struggle out from under. To her knowledge, Gray didn’t own a tie, let alone a suit. “When?”
“When you’re not home.”
Caridad pictured him donning a top hat and tuxedo. She added white gloves and patent-leather shoes with spats, superimposing his wiry frame in a ballroom with crystal chandeliers. “Why?”
Face aflame, he’d shrugged. “It relaxes me.”
A beige Volkswagen Beetle pulled to the kiosk on Reseda. The driver pushed open the passenger-side door. “Hey,” he called. “Need a lift?”
Caridad glimpsed the familiar moustache—a furry mass with curled-up tips—worn by Max, a middle-aged man who was in her classical drama seminar. Though tempted, she hesitated. Max wore an aftershave so powerful, it filled the classroom like mustard gas.
“Come on. It’s no trouble.”
Caridad slipped into the bucket seat and pulled the door shut. This was like diving headlong into a cinder-block wall of that scent. She sneezed three times.
Max handed her a box of tissues. “My car makes people sneeze,” he said.
Up close, she could see he was older than she’d thought, and he was amateurishly tattooed about the neck. Max, she now learned, was an embittered veteran, now “philosophically, morally, spiritually, and psychologically” opposed to the war in which he’d served. As he drove, he released a steady flow of passionate but dull political diatribe. This freed Caridad to consider how she’d not kept secrets from Gray—nor disturbed his clothing when he wasn’t home—the rest of the way to campus.
In the parking lot, Max asked when her last class ended. “I could give you a lift home.”
Caridad embarked on her usual list of polite excuses: She had her campus job that afternoon, she might stop to see a friend, she had to pick up some groceries, and—
“You do know that the RTD is going on strike at noon today, right?”
See, Caridad wanted to say to Gray, this is what happens when you can’t afford a daily newspaper, when you don’t replace a busted television set. Since his car broke down, he’d been getting around well enough on his ten-speed bike, but what about Caridad—bikeless and with less than five dollars stuffed in the pocket of her Levi’s?
“Yeah, the bus drivers are walking out to protest the fat-cat bosses in city government, the bastards that exploit the hell out of them.”
“But that’s impossible,” Caridad said, referring not to the exploitation of laborers, which she, the daughter of a cafeteria worker, accepted as a given. Instead, she was responding generally to the challenges of living without access to critical information like this and specifically to the problem of getting home without the bus.
Max shrugged. “So are you going to need a lift?”
Caridad shook her head and thanked him anyway, partly because she hoped he was wrong about the strike—maybe his political leanings clouded his perceptions—but mostly because she couldn’t inhale another molecule of that offensive aftershave. The roof of her mouth itched and her eyes stung from it. She trudged away from Max, gulping in great scent-free draughts.
Seated in a neatly arrayed sea of desks, Caridad was transfixed by the boyish neck before her, longing to touch the pale skin, the summit of knobby spine. Caridad imagined stroking that velvety hairline, palming the smooth band of warm flesh beneath it, and her hands tingled with desire. The boy flicked fingers over his neck as if he felt her gaze insect-crawling on him. Caridad looked away, letting her mind loft like a beach ball at a concert while the professor spoke from the lectern. My boyfriend likes to dress up, she thought. Gray likes to dress up.
How long had it taken her to catch on to what he was saying that morning? Gray must have thought her thick as paste. She had to have him spell it out. And she’d always considered herself not only liberal-minded, but even “out there” with her ideas about open relationships and her laissez-faire attitude toward Ernie, her body-building neighbor with his ever-rotating phalanx of young boyfriends. Gray’s admission shocked her, but to her credit, Caridad’s default reaction to being confounded was silence that she hoped might be taken for thoughtfulness. But when she finally understood Gray, she’d been shut down by this news, all thoughts snowed-out like images on the TV screen when it shorted-circuited. Reflexive courtesy then replaced thought, prompting her to say the opposite of what she felt. “I see,” she’d told Gray. Then Caridad had glanced at her wristwatch. “Wow, it’s getting late.” She was tempted to add, in a joking way, “My, how time flies when talk turns to transvestitism,” but this seemed off, so she’d said, “I should shower.”
Queasiness lodged in her stomach while she showered, as if she’d eaten a cake of soap like the one with which she was lathering herself. She whisked between shame for this unexpected narrowness of mind and compassion for Gray, who’d trusted her with what had to be a hard truth. And what did this confession mean? Did he plan to enlist her when he relaxed in this way? Would they then become best girlfriends? Or would they be more like lesbian lovers? She pictured Gray’s hopeful face, trying to read it for clues as she rinsed and dried off. When she’d returned to the bedroom, towel-wrapped and dripping, Gray had fallen back asleep. Or was he pretending? She’d dressed and slipped out of the house in silence.
Now Caridad gazed at the tender neck before her—such a vulnerable thing. She imagined flowing ringlets in place of his short hair, a capped-sleeve blouse instead of the T-shirt. Was this preoccupation hijacking her hearing, too, or did the professor just say something about cross-dressing? She focused on the precise man up front. He wore a self-amused look on his face, his usual expression when discussing the randy behavior of various gods.
“Thetis,” he was saying, “learned from an oracle that Achilles would die young and glorious if he joined Agamemnon in Troy, or else he would grow old in obscurity.”
Caridad scribbled in her notebook: Who again is Thetis?
“So she disguised her son as a woman.” The professor leered at the students, a twinkle in his eyes, and Caridad crossed out her question. Of course, Thetis was Achilles’s mother—she knew that—and she wondered about Gray’s mother, a frugal woman who clipped coupons and shopped at yard sales and thrift stores. Had she dressed him in his older sister’s clothing when he was young to save money?
“Thus, Achilles,” the professor continued, “is, as mentioned, the first-known cross-dresser. Thetis’s trick nearly worked, too, if not for Odysseus, who revealed the disguise, forcing Achilles to enlist in the army against Troy.” The professor shuffled his notes, straightening pages to insert them in his binder. “More on the Trojan War and Achilles in the assigned reading, and next time we meet—a quizzie!”
The cruelly understated euphemism unleashed groans in the classroom. These quizzies—demanding detailed knowledge of gods and goddesses, demigods, and that extensive cast of relevant mortals—were tougher than Caridad’s climatology exams, wherein she only had to remember cloud types and weather patterns. Plus, Caridad had stupidly opted to take this course the same semester she was enrolled in classical drama. She often confused Odysseus with Oedipus and Agamemnon with Antigone. After the first quizzie, she’d muttered under her breath, “If these are his quizzies, I’d hate to see his testes.” The guy with the attractive neck had honked with laughter at this. And now, while she was jamming her notebook into her bag, he turned to ask her to have coffee with him. But Caridad had two more classes and a shift at the library. More polite excuses, though she regretted these. That tempting neck—she would touch it one day.
The late edition of the Los Angeles Times in the Periodical Reading Room bore a headline announcing the bus strike at noon. After her shift at the library, Caridad borrowed her supervisor’s phone in a recessed office to call her mother for a ride home. With any luck, Mama would answer, and she wouldn’t have to speak to Felicia, who was still bitter that Esperanza had asked Caridad to be the baby’s godmother, and who made no secret of the fact that she considered her youngest sister to be A) lacking in morals for leaving her husband to live with two different men, and B) after the baby’s christening party, at which Caridad drank a considerable amount of wine, something of an alcoholic.
“What’s up?” Felicia asked after Caridad’s tentative greeting.
“Is Mama home?”
“She has Weight Watchers today. Why? What do you need?”
“Nothing, I guess. It’s just that I’m a little stranded—ha, ha, ha.” Since the baptism, Caridad relayed problems to Felicia as if these were self-deprecating jokes. “RTD went on strike, and—oops!—no buses. I have no way to get home.” She emitted a chuckling sound.
“It’s almost rush hour. You have any idea how long that would take? You do know Mama has cataracts?”
“I just sort of hoped—”
“She’s not your fucking chauffeur,” Felicia said.
“I know that.”
“Where are you anyway? Happy hour at some bar? You could ask the bartender to call a cab for you or get one of your male floozies to drive you home.”
“I’m not at a bar.” Caridad lowered her voice, so Caleb, her supervisor, wouldn’t overhear her as he pecked at a keyboard nearby. He’d stopped typing and appeared to be going over his work, but Caridad sensed suction from his ears as he listened in. “I’m on campus.”
“Well, don’t expect me to pick you up. I have Open House tonight, which you would know if you ever bothered listening to—”
“Look, Felicia,” she said, ready to release the hot burst of anger filling her lungs, but she caught Caleb’s eye and exhaled in a measured way as if cooling a cup of coffee. “It’s fine. I’ll call a cab. Thanks.” Caridad recradled the phone. One day she would break herself of the habit of thanking the people she yearned to slap.
Caleb, a Russian literature major who wore his long frizzy hair in a ponytail, now sipped from his samovar and inclined his lean torso toward her, his neck and head curved like the top of a question mark.
“Family! What can you do?” Caridad laughed again and yanked up her book bag for a quick getaway. But the bag’s strap caught under the rolling wheel of Caleb’s desk chair, resulting in an awkward struggle.
Then Caleb cleared his throat. “Happy families are all alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” He paused, arched a brow. “That’s Tolstoy, Anna Karenina.”
Caridad pursed her lips and nodded. “Thanks.”
As she loped down Reseda Boulevard, Caridad’s conscience pricked her for not remembering about her mother’s eyes. Lucky thing her mother didn’t answer the phone because Mama would have driven to the Valley despite being unable to see. “Ni modo,” she would have said. “Cataracts, so what?” If need be, Mama would ride a motorcycle into Hades to collect her youngest daughter. She was the kind of mother who longed for an opportunity to do something like that for any of her daughters. Crossing at Nordhoff, Caridad envisioned Mama exchanging housecoat and slippers for a fringed leather vest and boots, gunning a Harley past Cerberus and leaving the hound choking in a black cloud of exhaust as she gained momentum to vault over the River Styx. Smiling at this, Caridad leapt to the curb when a wood-paneled station wagon slowed alongside her.
The driver tooted the horn. Caridad stopped and glanced in the open passenger-side window. A middle-aged man, bald on top, with a monkish corona of rust-colored hair, summoned her with a wave. “Hey, where you headed?” he called out in a falsetto drawl. “I can give you a ride.” He was pudgy with a jaundiced complexion, a butterscotch pudding of a man. Caridad gazed out at Reseda Boulevard, the expanse of it. Heat shimmered on the pavement, creating iridescent puddles in the distance, reflective pools that would vanish with her approach only to reappear several yards ahead.
Caridad cupped her eyes against the sun. “Going as far as Vanowen?”
“I sure am.” He pushed open the passenger door.
She glanced right and left before stepping off the curb and ducking into the car. They traveled a few blocks in companionable conversation, Caridad complaining about the bus strike, when he interrupted to ask if she had a boyfriend. That’s when she noticed it, bobbing like an elongated pink balloon in his lap. He stroked this with his free hand like a pet. Despite the stomach-turning surprise of it, she couldn’t help but marvel at his sleight of hand, the magician’s trick of whipping it out undetected.
“My boyfriend’s an ex-con. He’s sort of jealous and violent.” Caridad stared at the streaked windshield while discreetly fumbling for the door handle with her right hand. She’d read that kidnappers remove the inner handle and lock release on passenger-side doors. “He follows me everywhere.”
“You’re funny.” The man jiggled and tugged at his penis. “I’m . . . ahh . . . I’m not going to hurt you.” As he slowed the car for a red light, Caridad’s knuckles at last brushed the smooth chrome latch. She grabbed her book bag and swung open the door, bolting when the car came to a stop.
Caridad raced for the entrance to the nearest building and heaved open the heavy glass door to a mint-green bank, a familiar landmark for its digital marquee that displayed the time and temperature, along with interest rates. Caridad slipped inside the dark lobby. A gray-haired man in a khaki uniform approached her, his shoes click-clacking on the parquet floor. “We’re closed for renovation,” he told Caridad. “I’m locking up after the carpenters.” He reopened the door, ushering her out.
Caridad nodded, panting to catch her breath.
“What’s wrong?” he asked.
“A man . . .” Caridad faltered, not wanting to tell this grandfatherly guard about that long, bobbing balloon. “This man scared me.” “Is he following you?” The guard looked past her, searching the street.
She shook her head. “I just got scared.”
He asked if she’d be okay, and Caridad nodded before stepping over the threshold and emerging from the dim lobby back into the sun’s glare, the hot and noisy boulevard streaming with cars, trucks, but not a single bus. The guard closed the door behind her, and Caridad surveyed the street—no trace of the paneled station wagon. She peered down the boulevard, the many blocks ahead. The perverted man hadn’t driven her more than a few blocks! Why, oh, why couldn’t he have waited at least until Sherman Way to whip out his thing?
Her feet, in huaraches, pulsed with pain, blisters stinging where skin chafed against the stiff leather weave, especially at the heels. After several minutes of power walking, her calves burned and the leg she’d broken throbbed in such a way that she listed to one side to favor it, causing her hips to ache. Her lungs burned, and she was simultaneously thirsty beyond belief while experiencing an urgent need to pee. She reached Vanowen, but she was several blocks from Van Nuys, the halfway point to her bus stop on Laurel Canyon. With her forearm, Caridad swiped sweat from her brow and plodded on.
A car cruised to the curb, honking. Caridad kept up her pace, not even bothering to look. During her long trek, many horns blared, men catcalled from cars, and some made pumping jerk-off gestures to get her attention. What is wrong with you? she wanted to ask them. Wearing jeans and a loose cotton blouse while walking in broad daylight, Caridad attracted the same lewd attention that she’d draw if she wore a G-string and pasties while pole dancing in a topless bar. She thought of Artemis and Actaeon, how the huntress turned the voyeur into prey, chased and devoured by his own dogs for gazing at the goddess after she bathed.
“Hey, where you headed?” A familiar voice, high and reedy—where had she heard it before?—called out to her from the car at the curb that slowed to keep pace with her. She hazarded a sidelong glance. The Library Rat leaned out the passenger-side window of a white sedan, waving her over.
Caridad stopped short. “I know you,” she said.
The Library Rat was drunk, and so was his friend, sloppily steering the large car. They urged Caridad to drink one of the bottled wine coolers sloshing about in an ice chest on the backseat beside her. But the sweet stench of these filled the car, sickening her. She refused, thirsty though she was. The driver, with slicked-back yellow hair like the Library Rat and a great pillow of a gut, kept saying he needed to get “some box.” Though Caridad wasn’t exactly sure what that meant, she suspected it had to do with sex. The Library Rat told him to shut his trap. Beneath the sticky stink of wine coolers, the car smelled of sweat, gasoline, and cigarettes.
“I just need me some box.” The driver ran fingers through his oily hair. “I’ll be okay once I get some box.”
“Shut your face,” the Library Rat said.
“Where are your books?” Caridad asked.
The Library Rat turned in his seat to gape at her. “What books?”
“You always have books with you,” Caridad said, “on the bus.”
“What bus?”
Caridad surveyed his small eyes and sharp nose, those long yellow teeth. Doubt crept up her spine, and she glanced at the door on her side. The handle and lock release had been removed, a trio of ragged-edged sockets in place of the handle, and a gap like a neat round bullet hole marked where the lock had been. “But I thought . . .”
“Look, we got plenty of drinks and smokes. How ’bout we party at your place?”
The driver moaned. “I need me some box.”
Something louder than the ocean filled Caridad’s ears. This was more like a turbine, a mind-scraping roar obliterating all other sounds and making her feel she would have to shout to be heard. Still, she kept her voice steady as she directed them to her street. The driver pulled into a parking space in front of Ernie’s stucco house. The two swung open their doors, and the driver unlatched the back door. As soon as Caridad hopped out, they crowded her. “I hope my boyfriend’s not here,” she said. “He has a bad temper. You better wait while I check.”
“I don’t think so,” the slighter man told her. “We’re coming with you.”
Caridad shrugged. “Suit yourselves.”
She opened the gate and stepped into the shady yard that held an array of potted ferns with long curling fronds, along with blooming red rose and peach-blossomed hibiscus bushes. The grass still damp from watering gave her reason to stamp her shoes on the concrete step. A dog yapped inside, and within seconds, the door yawned wide. The Herculean mass of Ernie’s densely muscled body appeared in the frame. He held Baby, his Chihuahua, in his arms, and he grinned at Caridad before he noticed the men behind her. She stood on tiptoes to kiss his cheek and whisper, “Help me get rid of these two.”
He handed her the tiny dog and swept Caridad inside his house. “What the hell you want?” Ernie stepped outside, shutting the door after her. Once inside Ernie’s air-cooled and well-insulated house, Caridad barely made out their raised voices. Baby trembled, whimpering in her arms. In a few moments, Ernie reopened the door and entered. “Damn.” He took Baby from her. “Where’d you find those bitches?”
“Long story,” Caridad told him, but after using the bathroom and gulping down a glass of iced tea, she relayed most of it.
“I’m going to say what I told you before: You need to buy a car.”
Caridad swirled the ice cubes in her glass. “If only I could afford one.”
“Get a loan.” Ernie set down his glass of tea. “You’re not helpless, you know, and you’re not stupid, so stop acting like you’re both.”
After Ernie made sure the white car was gone, Caridad stepped through the gate adjoining their yards. She’d forgotten her key, so she rapped under the decorative window in the front door. Through the beveled glass, she glimpsed her long mauve skirt and pink blouse sailing near. Caridad drew in a sharp breath. It was as if her clothes had become animated or another version of her, a doppelgänger, now approached. The bolt scraped, and the door swung wide. A narrow face caked with foundation cream greeted her with a bright waxy smile. Beneath this, Caridad spied Gray’s familiar honey-colored eyes, small nose, and lean cheeks. “Gray?” she said, inflecting his name not because she didn’t recognize him, but because she was slow to take in this transformation.
“I’m Leslie,” Gray said in a voice so high-pitched that in different circumstances, it would have triggered laughter instead of causing Caridad’s eyelids to prickle. “Gray’s not here, but please come in. He’s told me all about you, and I’ve been looking forward to meeting you.”
Caridad’s swollen feet balanced on the raised chrome strip that sealed the bottom of the door shut. She teetered, shifting her weight from her throbbing toes to her blistered heels, taking measure of Leslie from the floor up—patent-leather pumps, shaved legs encased in panty hose, flowing skirt, diaphanous blouse, foundation cream and powder, false eyelashes, penciled-on eyebrows, and that brown cap of synthetic hair, slightly askew. What would happen if she flat-out refused to take that next step? Then Caridad slid from the tracking and kicked off her shoes. With the syrupy deliberateness that spooled out her actions in dreams whenever she had the sense of performing the same motions before and again and always, Caridad reached to tug the dull-haired wig, to straighten the thing on Leslie’s head.