The Goddesses of Kitchen Avenue: A Novel Page 10

  But after that first minute, I just don’t care. The sound of hands slamming bags, the smell of chalk and dust and bodies, the sharp scent of competition jazzes me up. I can do this. I know I can. I just need some help.

  “Yo, Tony!” A man with Tony’s face, shorter and stockier, dances over, eyes bright with curiosity. There’s approval on his face when he sticks out his hand. “You’re Jade, huh?”

  I take the hand, nodding.

  “I’m Gabe.”

  “Nice to meet you.”

  “So, Tony says you want to train.” He crosses his arms on his chest. “How come?”

  I lift a shoulder. “Why does anybody?”

  “Lotta guys think it makes ’em tough. They just wanna swagger around and brag about being boxers. Lotta women have something to prove.”

  I meet his eyes dead-on. “I have a right cross that knocked a man clean out with one shot. I want to see what else.”

  “No kiddin’.” He inclines his head, tips it toward the other side of the room. Slapping his brother on the arm, he says, “Bro, go have a soda or something.” To me he says, “Come on.” I follow him, trying not to be self-conscious, but I feel eyes measuring me. “My trainer doesn’t want to deal with women, but I’ve found somebody who’s willing to talk to you. Hey, Rueben. This is her.”

  From the shadows peels away another shadow, as big as Darth Vader. As he comes into the light, I blink. Because this is one beautiful man. A dark, angular face, the biggest, softest dark brown eyes I’ve ever seen, a great mouth. His skin has the sleek shine of a seal and his arms are gigantic. I can tell by the way he walks that he’s in prime condition.

  He holds out his hand, his eyes evaluating me in a way that doesn’t feel threatening. “How you doin’,” he says in a low, blurred voice. Texas, I know, in that second. My grandfather spoke just like this. “I’m Rueben.”

  “Jade.” His hand engulfs mine. The palm is sturdy and dry. “Nice to meet you.”

  Gabe motions toward the ring. “You two cool?”

  Rueben nods. “So, you want to box?”

  I look at a youth punching a heavy bag. Hunger rises up in me. “Yeah. I started training out in Sacramento, but my grandfather got sick and I came home to take care of my grandmother.” I blink. “Sorry,” I say, clearing my throat. “He just died a few days ago. It’s still pretty raw.”

  “Don’t be sorry. Speaks well of you that you’re there for the folks. Not everybody cares like that these days.”

  “Yeah, well, they’re good people.”

  He nods, those empathetic eyes on my face, his hands braced on his waist. “I’ll want to see what you’ve got, but I’m looking at you thinking you’re in good condition. Started with kickboxing?”

  “How did you know?”

  “Lucky guess.” His grin is filled with big, very white teeth. I both relax and feel a zing in my chest. More seriously, he says, “Why not compete there? Or take up martial arts?”

  “Because I want to get in the ring. The boxing ring.”

  “Why?”

  “I get tired of this question. Because I do, that’s all.” I glare at him. “Because I want to see if I have what it takes. Maybe win.”

  “People get killed boxing.”

  “They get killed riding buses.”

  “You might end up not so pretty.”

  “Well, let me tell you, pretty has never gotten me one damned thing.”

  He laughs. Out loud. “Sister, that’s a lie.” He winks, punches my arm. “Ask a plain woman what your fine self has been getting you.”

  I think of the men at the gas station, but I also think of the boy at the grocery store who gave me an extra quarter pound of roast beef from the deli. “I’m willing to risk it.” I pause and add, “I want to be strong. As strong as I can be. I want to see what I can do with this. It’s not any deeper than that. I just want to.”

  “Good answer,” he says. “I’ve got an appointment in a little while, but why don’t we get together next week and we’ll see what you’ve got.”

  “Really?”

  “Yeah. How’s Thursday? Say six thirty?”

  “Excellent.” A surge of excitement makes me reach out and take his hand. “Thank you, Rueben. I mean it.”

  “No promises, now.”

  “I understand.”

  He turns my hand over. “Your husband cool with this?”

  “I’m divorced.” There is more bitterness in the words than I would have liked. Rueben only nods.

  Tony sees me crossing the gym and I manage to maintain all the way down the stairs and out to the street. There I stop and do a little quick dance and a couple of air-punches. “Whoo!” I say to him. He’s laughing.

  When I get home, there’s a message for me from Social Services. They must need somebody right now, because the woman asks me to call this evening about the résumé I’d sent them. They need a foster-care liaison, which is what I’d worked into before I left.

  Yeah. Life is looking up.

  Yes, the moon, the moon

  crowned with furze

  that dances, dances, dances

  in the Courtyard of the Dead.

  “Dance of the Moon in Santiago”

  FEDERICO GARCÍA LORCA,

  Translated by NORMAN DI GIOVANNI

  16

  TRUDY

  This weekend I’m not going to brood. On Friday night, I make a plan, a list of things I can do to keep myself busy. I won’t sit by the phone and wish for better days. I won’t beat myself up about anything. I’m just going to live in the moment—even if I need to have an action plan to make it work.

  The list says:

  1. Take a nice long walk in the morning. Bring the camera and enjoy it

  2. Check in on Roberta

  3. Go to the Lowe’s to look at paint

  4. Buy some if there’s anything good

  5. Paint the living room

  6. Get ready for trick-or-treaters. Make something special for Shannelle’s boys.

  SUNDAY

  1. Go to the movies. NO romantic comedies. Thriller?

  2. Fix a nice supper for Annie. Make her call her father

  3. If I get restless, call a friend and talk about something else

  4. Spend an hour with Roberta.

  Just having the list makes me feel more in control, and I wake up to discover it’s one of those brilliant fall days again. Bright, sunny, even warm. Which, frankly, bodes ill for the trick-or-treaters who will be running around in their goblin and princess and firefighter uniforms tonight. I don’t know why it always snows on Halloween around here, but I remember countless nights I shivered around with my three, coming home apple-cheeked and frozen and wet.

  First, I spend some time in the greenhouse, tending my plants and humming under my breath. I sit with Spider Woman for a while, trying to quiet my restless spirit, but when I start getting flashes of Rick’s other woman, my wrist starts to ache, and I quit.

  After breakfast, I set out for a walk. The air is cold but not so much that it’s uncomfortable in my hooded sweatshirt. In fact, since the wind is calm for once, it’s exhilarating. I bring my camera with me, and shoot little things along the way—a cat in a window, a beer can sitting on a fence post, frosted over and glittering in the morning, the Vietnam memorial in the island on Elizabeth.

  I walk to Mineral Palace Park. It’s quiet and I can walk in grass there, as many miles as I like. It used to be two or three miles, two or three times a week, a habit I started because I get backaches from sitting at the computer all day at work. Walking helps. Since Rick moved out, there are days I’ve lost track of how many times I’ve paced around that park and gone home exhausted, but in a good way. A way that gets rid of all that pain in my chest.

  This morning, I’m not particularly in pain, which is a surprising and pleasant feeling. I’ve been feeling a lot better since the night I got drunk, for reasons that are not clear. But I’m also tired of introspection and brooding and thinking only of
my relationship on every bloody possible level. There’s more to life.

  Like walking through the mini-neighborhoods on the way to the park. The first is a four-block square filled with neat ranch houses built in the fifties by a man named Bonforte, who had a thing for crab apple trees. He built the houses and lined the streets of his developments with crab apple trees. They are a wonder in the spring. This pocket neighborhood is extraordinarily well tended, the lawns clear of dandelions, their hoses rolled up on reels, the pristine driveways filled with silver Buicks and Lincolns and the odd Camry.

  It abuts one of the oldest spots in town—a pioneer cemetery through which I sometimes wander, counting my blessings that children don’t fall to so many things these days, and wondering about the humans attached to the sinking tombstones.

  Today, I veer in another direction, so that I can admire the mansions along Greenwood and Elizabeth, and to a lesser degree, Grand, which has not yet been claimed entirely by the upwardly mobile. The homes are enormous Victorians on generous lots, with old, tall trees and mature lilac bushes. I get my best ideas for perennial plantings from these yards.

  This morning, they’re preparing for the Halloween onslaught. People come from all over town to bring their children trick-or-treating on these streets, and the owners are good-natured about it, even generous. There are cardboard coffins in the grass and sheet ghosts hanging from trees, and special sound effects playing from enough houses that the whole area echoes with goblinesque noises. It is in this neighborhood that children gleefully scream over surprise mummies popping up from behind a bush.

  On a wide porch, a man and his daughter are hanging twisting orange crepe paper. The little girl, about seven, has whiskers and a cat nose drawn on her face in black, and she’s wearing pink cat slippers. She’s twirling and twirling and I raise my camera to capture her. She sees me and waves. “Hey, did you know it’s Halloween today?”

  Her father lifts his chin in greeting, smiling wryly.

  “I did. What are you going to be?”

  “A cat! Meow, meow!”

  “Have a good time,” I say, waving. Maybe I’ll put on a nice warm coat and come out here tonight to wander with the hordes of children. I don’t have many trick-or-treaters anymore, but I do so love the excitement and seeing all the little costumes, from the toddlers to the teenagers pretending they’re dressed up, in trench coats and rock-’n’-roll faces. Boys. Girls don’t seem to hang on to the habit as long as boys. I’ve had many a sixteen-year-old boy come to my door on Halloween.

  And that reminds me—what will Rick do tonight? He adores Halloween. Loves to answer the door and pass out candy and act scared over the monsters. He’s the one who buys all the decorations for Halloween and Christmas. Sometimes he even dresses up as a vampire, complete with bloody teeth.

  I have to admit it’s a good way to get me in bed. I love it when he comes after me with those teeth.

  Or I mean loved it.

  Snakelike slithers of memory like that are hard to ignore. I decide to just let them be. Those days did happen. They’re still mine. I don’t know what will happen tonight, and it’s not my problem. I have to worry only about me today. Do I wish he was going to be there dressed up as a vampire and making love to me afterward? Yes. Can I live without it?

  It’s beginning to look that way.

  The park is one of the jewels of the city, an oasis of greenery and tall trees just north of downtown. Once upon a time, there was a building that housed King Coal and Queen Silver, statues carved out of their respective minerals. But someone stole them and the building fell into disrepair and was eventually torn down. I’m not even sure where it once stood.

  These days, there’s a swimming pool for the kids, rose gardens and herb gardens, and my favorite thing—a lovely pond with an island in the middle of it. An old stone bridge arches over the water, and it’s this picture that’s been in my mind on the way here.

  To my delight, a thin crust of bluish ice covers the pond, all except for a perfect circle where a fountain has melted it. Ducks are skating and waddling over the ice, and paddling happily in the melted bit. The colors are extraordinary, a vivid sky with pipe-smoke puffs of cloud, the blue of the ice, the arches of the bridge echoing the circle of melted ice. I photograph it from the south end from several perspectives, even kneeling in the damp grass to shoot the scene through the old wrought-iron fence around it. I love the camera for the same reason I love plants—the shapes and colors and quiet make me feel calm.

  Thinking of shooting the same scene from the opposite angle, I wander north and spy a man on the bridge. He’s bending over the edge to scatter bread to the ducks below, and there’s a great symmetry to the echo of his arm and an old gaslight fixture to one side, and I raise the camera, shooting far, then zooming in a little at a time.

  He raises his head to look in the middle distance and I realize with a little shock that it’s my new neighbor Angel. Since he doesn’t see me, I zoom in close, closer, admiring his elegantly carved face, the way the light breaks down his straight, strong nose. They say a language shapes a person’s mouth, and I wonder if Spanish somehow makes for generosity of lips.

  At that moment, I realize he’s turned toward me and is looking directly into the camera. As if he’s used to being photographed, he smiles very slightly and inclines his head. I shoot the picture and lower the camera, smiling.

  He ambles my way, loose as a cat. “Good morning! Do you remember? We met last week?”

  I laugh, pulling hair away from my face. “Of course I remember. You’re Angel.”

  “And you are Trudy.” His tongue softens the hard consonants of my name.

  “Do you mind that I took your picture?”

  “No.” He smiles, gives me a charming shrug, then gestures toward the landscape around us. “Beautiful, eh?”

  I nod. From this angle, sunlight glitters and dances in places where the ice is melting. “I walk here a lot.”

  “This is the first time I have come here. Happy chance you are here, too.”

  God, I love his accent, the phrasings. It makes me want to be serious about my Spanish again. “Where are you from, Angel?”

  “Andalucía—the city of Sevilla. Do you know it?”

  It’s a magic word to me. “Oh! Flamenco.” I put my hand on my heart. “I have always wanted to go there. Always.”

  There’s a sudden openness in his eyes, which in the sunlight are the color of a hawk’s. “It is a wonderful city.”

  The day is bright yellow around us, a backdrop of leaves turning colors contrasting with the wavy darkness of his hair, the symmetry of his face. I don’t want to go anywhere. I want to stand here talking to him. “I was going to go to Spain to study when I graduated with my master’s, but I didn’t.”

  “Why not?”

  I lift my shoulders. “A baby came instead.”

  “Ah.” He looks at me, and I can see him in that old Spanish city, walking the streets easily. “What were you going to study?”

  “Lorca.”

  Angel’s face brightens. “Federico García Lorca?”

  “Yes.”

  He smiles, closes his eyes, and shakes his head very slowly. Then very quietly, he quotes, “ ‘Me he perdido muchas veces por el mar; con el oído lleno de flores recién cortadas.’ ”

  As he speaks in his honeyed voice, my skin breaks out in gooseflesh. It takes me a minute to find the best English translation I remember. My voice is huskier than normal when I say in return, “ ‘I have lost myself in the sea many times, with my ear full of freshly cut flowers.’ ”

  His smile is slow and luscious. “ ‘Con la lengua llena de amor y de agonía.’ ”

  “ ‘With my tongue full of love and agony.’ ”

  “ ‘Muchas veces me he perdido por el mar,’ ” he quotes, his eyes on my face. “ ‘Como me pierdo en el corazón de algunos niños.’ ”

  “ ‘I have lost myself in the sea many times, as I lose myself in the heart of certain childr
en.’ ”

  I have impressed him. He laughs, reaches out, and touches my hand, quickly lets it go. “I see you are intelligent as well as beautiful.” He gestures toward the sidewalk in front of us. “Are you walking back? May I walk with you?”

  “Of course.”

  We walk side by side, hands swinging next to us. After a moment, he says, “You should go to Andalucía now that your children are old enough.”

  I nod.

  He smiles. “You don’t believe me. Do you want me to tell you why?”

  It is impossible not to smile up at him in return. “All right.”

  “For one thing, it is very beautiful. And old. And the people are friendly.”

  “Good reasons.”

  “But there is more. Flamenco, of course. Bullfighting.” He pauses with a little frown. “Do you want to see the bullfights?”

  I wince. “No.”

  “It is too cruel for me.” He slides a coy glance my way. “Do you now think me …” He tsks, throws out a hand, finds the word. “… too girly?”

  Raising my head, I meet his gaze. “No.”

  “Good.” We pause at the corner to let a car pass. “Sevilla smells of flowers.” With an extravagant gesture that’s peculiarly Latin, he opens his arms and smells the memory. “Orange blossoms and jasmine and roses. So many flowers, pouring through little cracks in the walls, and tumbling over the balconies.” He tsks again, gives a little cock of the head. “It is beautiful.”

  Reaction is rushing down my spine. He is a poem come to life—as if the goddesses gathered together to think up someone to send to me. I can see them, Gaia and Spider Woman and Brigid—and probably Lucille—sitting together over cocktails, a bawdy bunch of seasoned women. I lift an eyebrow at them privately.

  Angel catches it. “That’s a wicked thought. Will you share it?”