First thing I noticed about Manny, the mole on his left cheek, a perfect circle, the size of a dime, and smack middle like a doorbell.
A mole? you say. He has such lovely features: crinkly brown eyes, prominent brow ridges, a soft, fleshy philtrum above his soft, juicy lips. The mole was distracting. Not that it bothered him. He never touched it when nervous or favored the other side. We went to a Dominican bar and danced bachata and he pressed it into my forehead, just above my left eye, and it was big and round and black but not hairy or scary, and his breath was cinnamon gum. As the night wore on, I wanted to lick it. Taste it. Later, I mean later, snapped awake and sizzled electric, I was convinced it was a recording device, a secret camera, that it would activate with a correct fingerprint or retinal identification and officers from some central compound would descend like flying monkeys, gather me and take me away.
His essence? A dog. The coloring of a German shepherd, with on-guard ears and that sharp, wolflike masculinity bordering on feral, rabid, but I detected something gentle, even fragile, underneath. The way he stood in public, not quite raised to full height, hands in his pockets, downcast eyes, I knew he was an illegal. Skittish.
“You know what’s sad?” he said, one of those first evenings we sat together in front of the Vargas house, under the summer moon, holding hands.
“What?” I said.
He pointed down the street, to a frail-looking elderly couple trying to maneuver an L-shaped couch into a U-Haul van. They kept banging it into the side of the door.
“Wait here,” he said.
I knew he was decent. Kind. He could lift heavy weights. What I didn’t know about Manny, I didn’t know he would stick. Stick by me and my baby girl.
• • •
And is this a good thing?
This is me, at the p-doc’s. He’s tapping one big brown shoe, short-long, short-short-long; it must be a professional no-no, but he’s oblivious.
“A good thing? Sure. I guess so.”
He’s new. A mandatory assignment, since I’ve finished with my twelve-week outpatient follow-up program at the hospital. Older, bland-blond face, side-part hair, an overall beigeness, though he’s irregularly tall, thus also a bit grasshopper-like, uncomfortable when seated, like he’s had to accordion his limbs to fit into some toddler’s chair.
Not much interested in moles or surveillance or even balmy recollections of romance, he wants to know how I’m doing for support.
“Support?”
“Yes.”
He’s already run the standard battery of questions, checked the check boxes, computed the data: hears voices = schizophrenic; too agitated = paranoid; too bright = manic; too moody = bipolar; and of course everyone knows a depressive, a suicidal, and if you’re all-around too unruly or obstructive or treatment resistant like a superbug, you get slapped with a personality disorder, too. In Crote Six, they said I “suffer” from schizoaffective disorder. That’s like the sampler plate of diagnoses, Best of Everything.
But I don’t want to suffer. I want to live.
I sit up straight. One hand on my lower back, the other on my belly, I take a deep inhale. Control top pantyhose. Two lace-up corsets. Spanx. One traditional postpartum faja.
Oh, support.
He doesn’t smile. He is not mildly amused. My parents are dead and my sister lives in Switzerland. Time’s up. The face, not a crack, ungiving as stone! Aiya. He sends me away with a prescription.
• • •
I go away. I run away! I get in my car. It’s raining. My windshield wipers drag as they swipe, a raggedy sound, one small boys would erupt into giggles over because all they can think of is farts. All I can think is, it’s not like the old days, when some stoical psychoanalyst would hear you out for hours and hours, withholding judgment while you lay on their sofa expelling your word-salad thoughts and florid delusions. Nowadays, it’s about pharma, drugs, and it hardly matters that all those tangled thoughts originate from a sentient being—a real person. Not a lone frontal cortex with its wiring gone awry, though you could picture it, that renegade mass, all veiny and purplish and intestinal looking.
I drive to Cousin Delia’s house. She’s not really Manny’s cousin, but it doesn’t matter, Essy loves her and her two older girls.
Today, Essy’s new trick: she crawls . . . backward. I sweep her up, press her cheek to my cheek. “Sweetie girl,” I say. My bao-bao, my hija. The life in her body so buttery warm.
“Bah,” she says. A finger in my eye. That beaming face. This is the best part about leaving her—to come back to this.
We go pick up Manny. This is the routine, twice a day, because Manny hates to drive. He works as a line cook at the Porky Pig, the twenty-four-hour diner where he started as a dishwasher. Despite its name, it’s a local hot spot with a certain cachet, the kind of joint where you find mini-jukeboxes in each booth and ogre-size portions on heavy white plates (except for the orange juice, fresh-squeezed, that comes in single-gulp glasses). Manny claims celebrities go there all the time, but he hasn’t spotted one yet, personally.
Today I bring Essy inside. There’s a fried chicken special for us early birds, and Manny loves fried chicken.
“How was the doctor?” he asks.
“Starchy,” I say.
“Cómo a potato?” He picks up a French fry, waves it in the air.
I pick up a French fry, wave it back. “Exactly,” I say.
“Huh.” Two fries later, a grin sneaks across his face. “Riiico, no?” He does a yum-yum tap on Essy’s belly until she laughs.
This is Manny, on a good day. I kick him under the table.
“But you’ll go back,” he says.
It’s a question or not a question, I can’t tell, but he’s Very Serious.
“I’m supposed to,” I say.
It’s an answer or not an answer, but he says, “Okay,” reaches over and squeezes my hand. His is always a little bit clammy.