“She was ancient,” he says, her eyes so wrinkled she must have been squinting continuously, even in her sleep, ever since they last saw her. He can’t imagine any other way.
“You don’t understand the ravages of time,” our mother says. “Look at this,” she says, and shows us her hands, holds down the veins and lets them pop back up again. “Ravaged,” she says.
Our brother said hello to the slut, put his hand on her shoulder and she jumped and held her hand to her mouth and then looked at herself in the window and brought her hand down. He was amazed by her thin wrists. Had their father held them, held both of them at the same time between one hand’s circled fingers? Our brother says, “She wasn’t any bigger than a bird.”
There’s been no word of your father, she told our brother. She had written to consulates and dignitaries. She was almost learning Spanish from all the overseas communication she had received, flowered with Señoras and permisos and disculpes and finally firmados.
“Signed,” she said, “it means signed.”
And our brother said she reached up and gestured as if in her hand she held a pen and was signing her name to the air. Next, she was planning to go to Spain. She said she would like to go and then give up there, too. Search all she could and then stop, live in some house on the beach, cut ties to home and sit on a balcony watching fishermen string nets. She grabbed my brother’s arm, he says. “Do you know what I mean?” she asked.
He wanted to take her in, anywhere. He tried the shoe store, but she held fast to the street, inviting him for coffee at the corner. She told him there were other men besides his father. “But men who were too big, or too small,” she continued. “Men who coughed through the night into handkerchiefs or men who could not pick up their feet and scuffed their slippers when walking across the floor. Men who lifted their feet too high, as if always walking through deep snow. Men who woke me because their breaths through stuffed nostrils sounded like crying children or cats. Another one,” she said to the waitress, before the waitress even set the first one down. Our brother tried to leave, pointed to his watch, tried to put on his coat. She grabbed his silk robe’s collar, saying, “That’s not what you want to hear, I know.”
He was afraid for her eyes, thought they were somehow wired and lit up from the back and smoke would start to pour forth soon. He wanted to tell her to rest them awhile. He almost reached across the table and shut them himself, in the way someone would shut a dead man’s eyes. She said she wouldn’t try to hide it, said she couldn’t, it was wearing her down. All she heard in her ears was the constant screech of trains braking, that’s what it’s like, she told him.
“That’s what it does,” she said, and she held out her hands, the fingers shaking, “an expensive manicure ruined,” and showed him where the Asian girl had gone outside the boundary of cuticle, painted polish on surrounding skin instead.
It began to rain and he thought how it would stain his silk robe and so he stayed. She ordered more and more. He wanted to hold her arm down, she had coffees so many ways, au lait and American, cappuccino and decaf and also cinnamon buns and apple tarts and iced confections and soon there was no room left on the table, they used another table beside them just to hold all the plates. Finally, he did hold her arm down, no more, he said, enough, and so she stopped and began to eat. Glazed flakes of pastry hung on her lipsticked lips. She said if only his father had left some word she would not be this way, and she took her hair and held it up scrunched in her fists and she pulled on the ends to show him the way it was that she was. A letter, a note, a fingered sentence on a misted window, anything at all, and she would not be the way she was, she says.
“Let up, rain,” our brother says was all he thought. She did not take her hands down from her hair until he held her by the wrists and brought them down. He thought they shook too, not just her hands, it was all of her, he could not tell from where the shaking started. She was crying now and still eating, still chewing and swallowing and then she spoke with her mouth full, saying this is how it was with most of her meals, they tasted of salt from her tears. “Come with me to Spain,” she said to him. “Help me find your father,” she said. He says he looked out the window when she said it. He says he pretended he did not hear her. Then she asked about his mother.
“My mother?” he said.
“I’m sorry, I’m not supposed to ask that, am I?” she said. “Shame, shame,” she said, she slapped one of her hands with her other hand. And it did let up, in fact the sun shone, our brother says. Weakly through clouds that looked like more rain. He stood up and left money and she stood up too, said they could walk together and she hooked her arm through his. They passed the shoe store again and she stopped and looked in. He kept trying to walk down the street, but she held onto him, still looking in. She said she swore the shoes were already worn, showing him scuffed toes and heels already lower on one side from a wearer with a weight problem.
“Should I go in and say something?” she said laughing. “The manager should be told he’s selling used shoes. Look at the stilettos, tell me they haven’t been on some Latin dance floor before, or the riding boots, haven’t they gouged a little horseflesh lately?” she says.
Then came the rain again, our brother said, and it came down so hard they could not see in the windows. They could barely see each other when they said goodbye, when he helped her up the steps and held her rain-soaked arm as she climbed into the bus.