Small in Real Life

THE SPANIARD

Two days before Jenny’s sixteenth birthday she got sick at school. They couldn’t reach her mother, so they gave her bus fare and sent her home on the RTD. She had chills and her head hurt, but she wasn’t throwing up. We don’t want those germs around here, the school secretary had said. It wasn’t unusual to send a sick kid out the school gates with a dollar fifty in her pocket. On the bus, Jenny leaned her head against the tinted brown glass. Los Angeles, April 1984, palm trees and cement drifted past her window. She thought about her bed, her comforter with pink roses. She felt its soft, quilted cotton press against her cheek.

When Jenny got home, her mother’s Volvo was parked in the driveway. No one answered the doorbell. She walked around the house, through the gate to the backyard. She slid the pot of her mother’s white petunias and picked up the key hidden underneath, though when she tried the back door, she found it unlocked. She walked through the laundry room, down a narrow hall toward the kitchen, where she would get a glass of water on the way to her bedroom. Suddenly, in the middle of the silent house, she heard a girlish twitter, unfamiliar, yet she knew it was her mother’s voice. Her mother must be on the phone.

But in the kitchen, her mother faced the miniature espresso machine, watching coffee drip into a tiny cup. She wore a waistless baby doll dress that showed off her tennis legs. Pink satin with white-laced edges. A dark-haired man with glowing olive skin sat at the kitchen table, smoking a cigarette, plate of ashes by his right hand. He nodded at Jenny like she was a fellow patron at the coffee shop looking for a table, and cleared his throat. A foreigner in a foreign land, Jenny thought, and then, as two streams of gray wisp blew out the man’s polished nose, Smoking kills.

Her mother nearly dropped the little cup on her way to serve it.

What are you doing here? she said.

I’m sick.

Oh. Her mother looked her over. Jenny wondered if she looked sick. She slumped her shoulders forward.

This is my friend Federico, her mother said.

Jenny turned to the olive-skinned man. Hello, Federico.

He bowed his shiny black head toward her.

It is a pleasure to meet you. I did not know that Celia’s daughter has the same fire eyes. His accent leaned on the Ce in Celia so it sounded like Seeeeeeeee-ya. Jenny’s eyes were brown like her father’s, Celia’s hazel. Federico brought the tiny cup to his lips and drank his espresso in one swig. And now, he said, as if he were a magician about to conjure a rabbit from the pocket of his sleek trousers, I must leave you beautiful ladies. His teeth were pure white.

Federico paused in the doorway and raised his hand in a flat palm wave, then the front door thudded shut. Celia stood flushed and preening in the middle of the yellow-tiled kitchen. Jenny pulled a glass from the cupboard and held its wide mouth under the tap.

I want a car for my birthday, or I’m telling Dad.

Federico may not be Spanish, Sam said. Jenny’s brother slid his finger down the list of Member States in his Model UN Handbook. Jenny and Sam were eighteen months apart, Irish twins, their mother called them, as if they were a gang sent to torment her. Sam was fourteen, younger and smarter. In Model UN, Sam represented Belize, a new Member State, with a Caribbean, British, and Latin American history. And that’s not even considering the undersized but oil-rich country’s Mayan ancestry, he would add. Belize had a small population, with sugarcane, bananas, barrier reefs, and oil deposits. Sam worked hard to establish liaisons in support of their tourism and export industries. It turned out that Belize was a Commonwealth nation, and Sam was the only ninth grader in the United States, Jenny assumed, with a poster of Queen Elizabeth II on the back of his bedroom door.

Sam frowned at the next page of Member States. He could be Argentinian, or Brazilian. At the fall conference, I met a kid at the water fountain who called himself Federico, and he was the Italian ambassador.

Sam’s Belizean name was Sam.

Does it really matter which one? Jenny wanted to talk about the car, her car.

They’re Latin, southern cultures. The men are passionate lovers. If he were from England, say, or Canada . . . Sam leaned back in his chair and pushed a foot off his desk to send the chair spinning.

What?

He might confuse lust with love and marry her. We’d have a broken home. Sam said passionate lovers and lust and broken home without a snicker. He assimilated details like a calculator figured numbers. Her parents deferred to him when they purchased appliances. Sam was partial to Whirlpool and KitchenAid.

He’s Latin, Jenny said. She stretched out on Sam’s bed. She was a full-bodied girl, marooned in this sunny land of California waifs, nymphs like her mother. Mr. T the Cat slept on Sam’s pillow. She pulled Mr. T onto her stomach, which had started to ache, though the chills had stopped, and Mr. T curled into a ball.

Sam spun and spun in the chair, his eyes on the ceiling.

Federico wears cologne, Jenny said. He stinks like that skunk in the cartoon who falls in love with the white cat. Though she had only smelled smoke coming off Federico, and the slight soapy scent of her father after he showered.

Pepé Le Pew is French, Sam said. If you tell Dad, he’ll move out. His hazel eyes, their mother’s eyes, lit up. I bet I could get a sailboat, he said. The fathers always moved out to condos in the Marina.

So Mom won’t get me the car, Dad’s leaving, and you’re getting a boat?

I see, Sam said, studying her. You’re going with Idle Threat. He enunciated so she could feel the capitalization.

Far from idle, Jenny said.

She’d wanted a car every second of every day since the wearisome horrors of high school. Jenny had fallen between the cliques. She was lazy for the smart kids, shy for the theater freaks, klutzy for sports, and the druggies resented her sarcasm. The car would be her own land, her territory of oneness. She was a loser walking the sidewalks alone. On the road in a car, wearing sunglasses, she was someone else. Her sixteenth birthday: her car in the driveway wrapped in a bow like on TV. She imagined driving the coast highway in her red VW Scirocco, thick, salty air whipping her face. Her freedom and her mother’s penance bound together at sixty miles per hour.

Sam watched the queen staring at them from the back of his bedroom door. He nodded slowly to Elizabeth II. Jenny liked to assume Sam was with her, a twin on her side as her mother claimed, and yet he ran a sovereign nation. He had negotiated favorable trade agreements for a third world country with the prime minister of Great Britain.

What if she doesn’t believe you? he said.

She believes me, Jenny said. She patted Mr. T harder on the head, dragging his cat eyes wide open with the force of her palm.

Sam put the tips of his fingers together and gazed into their emptiness.

What if she doesn’t care? he said.

Jenny thought of her mother in the pink silk dress, her eyes specked with yellow light, her wavy brown hair rolling down the middle of her back. Her mother had the legs and the temperament, the hair and the golden eyes (wasted on Sam), for husbands and Federicos, Canadians and Englishmen.

She better care, Jenny said.

Her father was home for dinner, sitting at the table where Federico had stubbed out his Camel or Lucky Strike or, more likely, Marlboro Man cigarette. Her mother was doling out soggy lumps of chicken chow mein onto the plate in front of him when the phone rang. Jenny leaned back in her chair and picked up the receiver hanging on the wall. She watched her mother, but her mother was looking down at the chow mein, slopping the brown mess onto Sam’s plate.

Hello? Jenny said. Federico?

The caller waited a few seconds, and then she heard the click of the receiver.

They hung up.

Her mother sat down beside her father. She pinned squishy noodles, sprouts, and water chestnuts with her fork, while her dad eyed Jenny as if he were in on her joke, as if she had one. Her father had the straightforward gaze, capable gait, and quick, hungry smile of a fighter pilot. He’d joined the Air Force to avoid the draft. Sam annoyed her when he pointed out that their father never flew anything, not even a bug-eyed Bell helicopter.

A hanger-upper, eh? her father said, and swept a pile of water chestnuts into his mouth.

If it was for me, they would’ve said something. Jenny sipped her chicken broth and nibbled at the toast her mother had prepared for her tender stomach.

Not if he didn’t have the nerve, he said. He sat back and raised his thick eyebrows at Jenny. He wasn’t tan like Federico, but he understood his appeal; in that way, they were comparable. He had strong shoulders. Her father thought boys called girls, even girls who looked like Jenny. She hoped he was right, that he could see further ahead. That her swelling body was on its way to beautiful. With her father around, she felt her soft teenage shape could be a stage to overcome, like acne.

The phone rang again. Before Jenny could reach for it, her mother rose and picked up the receiver. Hello? she said, and waited. No thank you, we’re not interested at this time.

Jenny looked across the table at Sam, at this time.

He mouthed, Pants on fire.

Someone selling garden hoses of all things, her mother said, carrying over a bowl of fruit salad for dessert. The patio was still wet from where she’d dragged their hose from pot to pot to douse her herbs and strawberries that afternoon. Alibi, Jenny thought, but not alibi. Liar.

Garden hoses, her father said. What an idiot.

Her mother looked down at the brown noodles she was catching with her fork.

He cares about plants, Jenny said.

Saving the petunias, her father said, and nodded. Honorable.

I don’t believe making money off the needs of another guy’s flowers is honorable, Sam said, and Jenny kicked him under the table. He kicked her back, his sneaker scraping her bare ankle, but she didn’t flinch.

Her father winked at Sam, then looked at Jenny.

What do you think, Jen? Isn’t that commerce?

Just as easy to go to the store than have it sent to the house and not know what you’re getting, Jenny said.

Her mother sat back from the chow mein and sipped her wine.

It’s about convenience, her mother said.

Sam faked a sneeze into his napkin. He wanted Jenny to look at him. He wanted both of them to turn hysterical.

Are you getting sick, too? her mother said to Sam.

Maybe, Sam said.

I like going to the store, Jenny said.

I agree with Jen, her father said. His eyes twinkled. He had twinkling eyes, her father, and he loved roller coasters. They rode in the front car and never held on to the safety rail. Put your arms up in the air, he would say, and scream.

She could’ve asked her father for the car, but then he’d ask her mother, and her mother would never have agreed. Her mother worked against extravagance in children. And if her father had to choose between Jenny and her mother, he would choose her mother. He would choose her mother over everybody.

The next day Jenny went to school. When she got home from band practice, her mother was at a movie with Barbara from down the street and her father was watching the Dodgers on TV. Sam was out playing Dungeons & Dragons with some kids from Developing Economies. Jenny made popcorn for her father. On TV, a Dodger walked up to the plate, kicked the dirt, and cranked his bat up behind his shoulder.

From the couch, her father said, Swing for the fences.

Last summer her mother threw a surprise party for her father’s fortieth birthday. She hung paper lanterns from the magnolia tree in the yard. She set up round tables with white cloths and a bartender on the patio. She wore a silver wrap dress that tied at the hip, plunged at the neckline, and slit up the side to show most of her thigh. While they waited for Sam to show up with her father, her mother introduced Jenny to guests. She held Jenny’s hand and pulled her around like a prop, a toddler’s ugly wooden duck tied to a string. Or not a duck, a blue elephant. In her blue cotton dress with red polka dots. "This is