Rosa

IV. Blood

IV.

Blood

She is right about the dragging in her womb. The clots start rushing out of her as soon as she leaves Winnie, and by the time she gets to Clifford Onderdonk, she has soaked the two pads she put on as a precaution. At least it isn’t always twice a month anymore, or always so heavy as that last day she saw Wolfie—a day the cramping always brings back to her:

Wolfie sitting in his bath chair and she leaning over him, his hand, his clever hand up her skirt and into her panties, discovering her soaked pad and pushing it aside and her womb leaping, bringing her, bringing her, just needing to find her n****e with his mouth for it to happen, and the clots rushing out of her, staining his hand and the bathwater and the towel she was sitting on. She remembers how respectful and apologetic he always was. Asking her forbearance as if only he was stealing a pleasure, how unembarrassed he was about her period. Oh, she can remember. She can remember that whole day. It was the day that spaceship was going round and round in the sky, the day of Adie’s hundredth birthday and the mayor’s coming to the Sunshine Club; and she’d had to do two shifts practically in a row; and Priscilla was hit by a car riding home from the sisters.

Agotado, how she’d felt at the end of that day, carrying about her dragging womb, feeling Wolfie’s hands on her long after they were gone, the way she used to feel Alejandro’s pene even when it wasn’t there, touching her womb, deep, deep, bringing on the cramp, the flow.

When we leave my aunt’s to go to my father, my poor aunt was so unhappy, she tells little Esmeralda the next time she comes.

Because she never had any of her own. My uncle had to start taking her to doctors. She went to bed and wouldn’t get up from the day we left. Rosa has identified this as the reason for The Sadness that had descended on her family.

She was sad because you went? Yes, my uncle say she was never the same again. But we did go back. Two of us, later. My little brother, Tito, was the first. He run away from my father late one night and go straight to my aunt’s and crawl into the big bed with her and my uncle. And I went back, much later. With my two children.

And you were happy then, at your aunt’s? What an astute child. Rosa has thought it over and decided they were good years, both when she was a girl and later with the children. They grumbled and did what Aunt Tina wanted. It felt very safe and good, yes.

But I keep thinking I not happy when I go back. Because I think I love my husband still. I use to hang on to my children and cry and cry. My aunt hate that. Clean them up if you love them so much. So I would work and forget.

Your husband was bad to you, so you left. Yes … She must not tell the child about these things.

Two years ago my father got drunk and hit my mother and we moved out, the girl tells her then. We went to live with my uncle in West New York.

Rosa is shocked. She never heard about this. Ah, this child knows things, she thinks. But you come back?

Yes, but he knows she’ll leave him again if he hits her. All kinds of bad things happened while we were gone. His cousins came and moved in with him and stole his truck and a bunch of money. My mother had to straighten out everything.

Dear child. She knows more than I ever did at that age. My poor Aunt Tina is stiff from the arthritis and hardly can see with the cataracts when I go back, she tells the little girl. She work as hard as before though.

They sit at the kitchen table for these sessions now, and the little girl writes these bits of Rosa’s life in a blue school notebook. Eventually Laureano comes in and wants coffee, so Rosa boils the milk and tints it with the breakfast coffee saved in a thermos Eva gave her for Christmas. Laureano likes to tell the little girl things, too, about the houses he’s built. As if he is jealous of all the attention being paid to her, Rosa. How silly he is.

Yes, it is Tito, the baby, oddly, the one who ran back to their aunt, that gets the idea of Lowell, Massachusetts, in his head, Rosa tells the little girl.

Some friends of his working there. He talk about it for months … I remember little Mondo try to say the word … Mass-a-chu-setts. And then one day he just go. Tito. He work in a shoe factory, and mop hospital floors at night.

And so little by little I get the courage to come too. With Mondo and the new baby still in diapers. I work in the shoe factory till it close, then I pack apples in cartons, out past Billerica. And I live with my two babies in one of Tito’s rooms at the back of a tenement by the river. It is so sad in the city. There are no flowers, only big brick buildings with windows you can’t see into they are so dirty, and streets and sidewalks. Then I find the place in Billerica. It is over a*****e, and I see the green grass and gardens and huertas…

Orchards, says Esmeralda. Yes, orchards. And Mondo go to a little school on a yellow bus that stop every day in front of the house. And he and Eva run around and play with the children from the store. And I buy that mueble over there—Rosa points to the oak cupboard where she keeps her best dishes and the cans of galletas Goya that Mondo painted flowers on for her, and the coffee mill brought from home.

And I walk. There is no yellow bus for me. I walk seven miles to the work and seven miles home.

And each month I can buy something better: a Slumber King bed for me and new mattress for the children, and a big lamp that Mondo and Eva break, so I have to mend a hundred pieces with the Ega Pega … Maybe it is the little girl’s making such a thing about her life that is causing Rosa to slip back into a habit she had as a teenager in love with Alejandro: making up little dream scenes … about Wolfie now that she never sees him. It is ridiculous. She even thinks up things he would say to her if he could talk. Sometimes she imagines it’s Wolfie she’s telling all these stories to, instead of the little girl. What made her think back then that he wouldn’t have been interested in her life? When he was well, he helped a lot of people she knew with their problems: Dalila Flores whose husband was trying to work and take care of her four children that time the Migra wouldn’t let her back in the country after she went to see her dying mother in Mexico. There wasn’t any money in it for Wolfie, helping them; so he had to be interested in Dalila’s problem.

Rosa’s problem was her story. She could have told Wolfie her story while he was busying himself with her breasts.

And Lidia Bustamante’s husband who built a garage without permits and the town was going to knock it down just like they did to the house Laureano was building in Jackson Township … Wolfie saved Lidia’s garage, and he would have helped Rosa if she’d known him back then.

If they ever send her to him again, she’ll tell him all her thoughts. He can’t speak, but he can hear. What an i***t she was, never talking to him all those days. Only baby talk. How could she have…?

In the meantime she imagines him watching her from his wheelchair: not just at the Sunshine Club, where he might actually watch her, but everywhere: while she waits for Clifford to get into the bath, while she struggles to wash under Winnie’s girdle. It makes her patient, and all her actions become somehow graceful and even beautiful, as if Wolfie is aware of them. It’s absurd, she knows. How would he get himself in his heavy motorized wheelchair into hiding places to spy on her wherever she goes?

Sometimes, like today, when the dragging womb brings the memory rushing back, and she feels Wolfie’s hands, feels the yearning for his lips on her breast, she goes into the bathroom and locks the door and fondles her own right breast and brings herself. Oh, Oh, Oh Wolfie…

And of course she is ashamed. She is a shameful person. She watches people around her: Priscilla, Mrs. Rose, Eulalie Arsenault, Mrs. Hingy at the agency, and she knows that none of them have such shameful thoughts as she, Rosa.

It was the Fahey woman told the agency, she’s certain. On Monday, coming from the sisters’ house, she sees her waiting for the bus with her big plastic bolsa where she carries her flip-flops and her sandwiches and her police radio, things she needs to be comfy, as she calls it, during an overnight. Once, when their shifts overlapped, Rosa caught her with her feet up, and her food spread out listening on that radio to all the neighborhood criminal activity, ignoring Eulalie’s calls for a drink of water.

And she’s the one goes to Wolfie now. Sooner kiss a mackerel than that woman, Alcide Arsenault observed to Rosa once.

So as to keep up her self-respect a little, Rosa needs to recall how Wolfie’s caresses began, how apologetic he had been, and worshipful, not of Rosa but of some idea he had of woman.

Ooman. He got the word out one day as she bent to help him into his chair. He had his good hand on her waist, so he could feel where her hip swelled out. Rosa, like her mother, was una mujer bien plantada.

Woman. He ran his fingers over her hip, thinking some other words he couldn’t say. He was almost like the midwife in Xoyatla, misia Fernanda, sizing up Mondo’s approaching birth, was she wide enough?

All this was outside her clothes. Like a blind man figuring the shape of a once-familiar object. Another time she needed to bend over him to brush his hair, he weighed her right breast with his good hand and moaned. Then his eyes asked forgiveness, poor man; he suffered more than she did during this stage of his studying her. She couldn’t help it, her right breast was wishing away the cloth of her blouse, her bra. Shameless woman. None of this is for Esmeralda’s ears.

Sometimes, like a doctor or a priest, his eyes questioned her, as if he wanted her to explain to him what all this meant. Then her own thoughts hid themselves. How could she say what her breast desired?

And all this time, and even before, she saw him helpless and naked in the bath chair. As he stood holding her shoulders, she washed his thighs and buttocks and behind his scrotum, only handing him the washcloth, as she’d been instructed in the classes, for him to wash his own p***s.

His body was beautiful to Rosa, his skin white and spotless like her aunt’s gardenia blossoms. His affected legs gone back to a child’s unmuscled body. In the chapel of the Italian church was a nearly naked Christ figure, laid across his mother’s lap, that reminded Rosa of Wolfie. Wolfie was a Jew like Jesus, she knew, and she didn’t believe what some said about the Jews killing Jesus. Why would they kill their own beautiful son? There had to be some other explanation.

Wolfie was painfully thin. Under the arch of his ribs his stomach was hollow, like the cave beneath the ribs of the crucified Jesus. To Rosa this was achingly sad. She was a student of crucifixes and had her own large plaster figure in her bedroom. She had bought it at a yard sale and felt rich in religious art since hanging it over the bed. Laureano called it the estatua de la mala muerte and accused it of coming into his dreams. To Rosa the great arch under the breastbone represented suffering: the strain of the raised arms supporting the weight of the body. She wondered if the little peg securing the feet to the post offered any relief. Probably it hurt too much to rest any weight on it. Usually the face, fallen over like a wilted flower, reflected patience or resignation; the pain was there in the great arch of the ribs and the hollow beneath.

Wolfie didn’t eat enough to keep himself nourished and sometimes had to have a feeding tube. Rosa could coax him and make sure he ate while she was going to him. She was sure this wasn’t the case anymore. Sometimes she would look over at his table at the Sunshine Club and note that the aides had put the tray beyond his reach or had not removed all the little lids on the bowls and cups.

What did his body look like now? she wondered. Did it require Rosa’s attendance for its beauty?

She was guilty of taking more time about Wolfie’s bath, for example, than she did with a man like Clifford. She had also studied him seriously, taking time to straighten his bad arm and flex the fingers, making sure to thoroughly wash inside the clenched palm.

You couldn’t see the p***s of the figure in the Italian church, but she thought it must be well-developed like Wolfie’s. It was the largest p***s she had ever seen. And the only Jewish one. She wasn’t sure what this meant. Usually it nestled fatly in its nest of curly black hair between Wolfie’s legs. A sleeping animal.

But sometimes, like her breast, it woke and had something it wanted; then they both looked at it with concern.

For a long time, in any case, Rosa knew his flesh, while her flesh could only wish the clothes away. If he wanted to know hers, he must advance on his own. She knew if he did she would not scream or put in a complaint as some of the aides had done. That was all she knew.

Then, when summer came, one day she wore a loose little chemise with slender shoulder straps and the bra built in, so that you didn’t have two sets of straps. It was pretty and not the sort of thing she usually wore unless it was very hot out. He couldn’t take his eyes off of it while she helped him undress for his bath; and once she got him seated on the bath chair the sleeping p***s came out of its nest and stood up proudly. Rosa laughed, and they were comfortable enough together by then that he laughed too, and then into the loose chemise went his hand and found her bare n****e. She couldn’t help gasping in pleasure.

Ooman, he groaned. Ooman! And then he found the flesh at her middle and her hip and her belly, and then he knew, dear man, that her breast was calling him back to the n****e; and that was enough to bring Rosa, so long she had been waiting.

So Rosa came to represent Woman to Wolfie, and he worshipped her and she accepted his worship.

But it was a sin, Rosa told herself. And now they were both punished. Rosa had taken up the study of sin when she used to teach the catechism classes to the little Mexican children at Saint Barnabas. There were little sins and big sins and if you committed too many little sins you were more likely to go on to the big ones. Some sins you did in your mind and then, sometimes, you went on to let yourself fall into them. This was the kind of sin she and Wolfie were doing. But Rosa never felt this quite covered the study of sin, and had her own thoughts about it.

Next day the bloodletting is worse. The labor pains, the clots passing. The last time wasn’t so bad; it lasted a whole week, but it wasn’t so much blood. This is the real thing: she has to call in and go to bed. The little girl comes over and fixes her some tea and toast. Does she get hers yet? Rosa wonders, as the girl stirs about in the kitchen. Probably not, but she will soon, by the looks of her. Already she looks like her mother, with her dark eyes under the heavy bang. A kind child. Rosa wishes her a happy life. She will be successful, like Eva.

Eva was kind, even when she was a baby. Rosa clung to her for comfort after she left Alejandro and went to her aunt’s. Now she’s in the Army in Georgia, but calls every week. Soon she’ll be a colonel, Rosa thinks with a flush of pride.

I gave Don Laureano some too, the little girl tells her when she comes with a tray. A pretty one Eva gave her for Mother’s Day—Rosa hung it on the wall and never thought to use it. And the toast arranged so pretty in triangles on the plate.

He really did build all those houses he tells you about, Rosa says, embarrassed for Laureano, who is soft in the head for the little girl.

Tell me about one of them. Well, the best of them was torn down. It have bathrooms and a pretty deck you can see the river from. The Shawsheen River. It was going to have a family room with a wood stove, and carpets all through.

And why did they tear it down? Town did it. He don’t get the permits. He go to get them and they insult him, he says. So he build it without them. And before he can finish it they come and knock it over with a bulldozer.

Goodness!

He still have some of the materials, so he pay a contractor to get the permits and buy another lot in the township and put it up again, almost as nice.

Well, it was a long time ago. I remember it take me two buses then and a long walk to go to work in the apple packing … You are so clever to find that tray. My daughter give it to me. She is almost a colonel in the Army.

Yes, they send her to school, she’s so smart. School for social work. When she gets out in fifteen years she have a house she save to buy and a career to work, plus her pension.