Give It To Me. Ana Castillo

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СКАЧАТЬ health education history when such things like sex were not considered appropriate to discuss with kids, she knew about sexish things.

      One day Giovanni, handsome as the devil’s own and dumb as dental floss, and she were in the coat closet while the other kids were at recess. He had his fingers way up there like tiny miners lost in the catacombs when they realized the teacher had stayed at her desk during recess. They peeked out and saw her trying to readjust her tights, one leg had been noticeably twisted around the ankle. The teacher had two rods for ankles but football-player calves. Mrs. Preston had taken the hose off at her chair and was now pulling them up straight, the dress up near the bra line. It made Palma and Giovanni hot, and when he stuck his fingers up the girl again she thought he busted her hymen since he’d gone up like an electric screw gun.

      Giovanni had been held back because first he was from Italy and didn’t speak English very well, and second, because, in any case, it wasn’t a language problem why he did so badly in school. By the time they reached eighth grade Giovanni was turning sixteen that summer, and he dropped out. He went to work at his family’s deli business on Harlem Avenue. Palma often thought of Giovanni during those long dry spells when she had to rely on her own fingers. She’d recall Giovanni reaching up there and them both thinking of Mrs. Preston’s pillow ass with stretch marks and flesh dark as a roasted chestnut with no panties as she gave her tights a clever snap around the flap-over waist.

      Now, getting ready for Palma’s reunion with Pepito, she slipped on Michael Kors loafers that matched the bag (near-Alta-Mulch-level birthday gifts from a woman left behind) and the bi (buy?) everything woman expelled herself from the hotel room. She didn’t know what it was about hotel rooms, but they had the genuine power to suck you in and make you want to stay in them until you died. You became an instant porn addict, threw cochon to the wind and ordered room service late for an overpriced burger that you’d never have ordered except that you suddenly felt like committing suicide and therefore, it was not a problem (another thought you didn’t have until you were stuck in that room with a Gideons Bible and nothing to do). You masturbated like a fourteen-year-old boy with a bad case of acne and no social life or later hit the minibar, got loaded, and started texting people who didn’t want to hear from you.

      The one thing you wouldn’t do was pick anyone up. You’d seen enough Dateline mysteries. (There was that pretty Russian blond who got into a hotel elevator with a big dude. Cyclops huge. It was caught on camera. Later, you saw him casually leaving the building pulling a large suitcase on wheels. The victim was in that suitcase folded up like a rag doll. Incredibly, she survived.) As for God’s hand in the matters of Palma’s life, she was dealt the revengeful, wrathful Lord of the Old Testament. If he even ever bothered with a gentile, he had no reason to be any more compassionate with her religion-free existence than he was to Job, Adam, or Moses, who he was constantly testing and they were his favorites.

      Palma Piedras had survived thus far. She’d survived Abuela’s house and tío Jim-Bo and Pepito’s whininess during his childhood (spoiled from her grandmother’s preferring anything with a penis. That’s why he got Palma’s room). Pepito was a terrible two when he came to their household. The kid got into everything, drank toilet water with the cat. The tomcat, good for killing rats, taught the new household member a few survival tricks of his own. It was as ugly as a boil on your ass, but Pepito was all the opposite. Whose looks he had inherited she didn’t know because Palma never met his mother. She suspected he was Jim-Bo’s kid and that one of the skanks he went out with on Saturday nights brought Pepito over to Abuela’s, once the baby could walk and had stopped sucking titty. He didn’t look like Jim-Bo; he looked like the Angel Gabriel.

      When he was seventeen Pepito got a girl in the neighborhood pregnant or so the girl claimed when she came over with her mother and father to force Pepito to do the right thing. Now you see what you did? Abuela said, probably imagining the horrors of having the girl move in, drop a kid, and then leave it there for her to raise at eighty-something. She slapped Pepito. He was taller than the shrunken grandma, of course. Taller than Jim-Bo. A boxer, in fact. Only Abuela could touch him and get away with it. Pepito decided the right thing was to leave home.

      Palma was done with her first marriage and, by then, living on her own. It took her eight years to get her bachelor’s degree. During the day she worked as a docent at the Art Institute. Tour guides normally had their degrees in fine arts. Palma Piedras, lone satellite orbiting in space, had her ways.

      Now Pepito was out and they decided to meet after all those years. She concluded he wouldn’t care that she was forty-plus (to his thirty-two) because he was like a brother to her. Palma had sent him money now and then. Who else thought of him? A pining ex-girlfriend looking up old boyfriends when finalizing a divorce or drunk with her girls when one would say, Whatever happened to that melt-in-your-mouth caramel, what was his name? Pepito, she’d say. It came right to her lips as if he were waiting for the return of his tongue. She looked him up or asked around and got his address. They’d started writing and she’d send money. Palma figured there were ex-girlfriends because there was one true fact, besides his nature, the Mexican killer instinct, and that was his being a lover. Or so she imagined.

      One time when she was living on her own, and Pepito was all of fourteen, he cut school and had the nerve to go to her flat. She was home with a cold that day, studying in bed. He bought a can of Campbell’s chicken noodle soup and a small jar of Vicks VapoRub. She thought he was el Niño Fidencio with a buzz cut. Palma felt like the loneliest woman in the world when she was sick like that. He left them on the kitchen table and followed her to the broom-closet-size bedroom where the sick woman climbed back into bed. He looked at her hard, smiling. Fourteen and already cocky. A man with secrets. Fucking, no doubt, not jacking off like a choir boy.

      She was all snot and puffy eyed. Her long hair was pulled up in a bun with stray hairs stuck to her sweaty neck. His big cousin stared back at him. Are you in a gang? She asked him. What? Me? Naw, man. I ain’t stupid. She wanted him to fuck her but all she said was, That’s good. You’re a good kid. Abuela would kill you, if you did join a gang. Jim-Bo . . . Aw, he said, waving a hand, meaning he didn’t give a flying fig about their uncle. He called him tío, like she did, when he was little, but as soon as he passed Jim-Bo in height he referred to him by name—if he felt like being polite. He was right. If he had been Jim-Bo’s son, as the primitos were both led to believe while Abuela never came out and said it, why hadn’t Jim-Bo stepped up to the plate? Too late by the time Pepito was in her micro-pad, three stories up in the big apartment building she lived in then. Palma remembered Giovanni and his Magic Flute fingers and looked at her little cousin’s. They were nothing like the boy’s in the classroom coatroom. Pepito’s were powerful. He was already boxing. Maybe he did it to keep himself out of a gang. Maybe he was lying to her and had already gotten into one.

      Well, I best be going, prima, he said. Grin. Secrets. My girl’s waiting downstairs for me, he said, hand on the front doorknob. You have a girl? Palma asked. Yeah, of course, I got a girl, man, he said. It was about twenty-two degrees out that day. She wrapped a blanket over her shoulders, went to the window, and watched him exit downstairs. A waif in a heavy coat, mittens, ski cap, and long, black hair waited out there. He took her hand and they trudged off in the snow. The girl slipped on a patch of ice and he quickly grabbed hold and steadied her.

      Palma didn’t see Pepito for a long time after he left Abuela’s. Or at least, she couldn’t remember. Abuela caught her up on him. He was living for a while with a girl a little older than himself who had two little kids. She came over one time and complained that he had not come home all night. Another time, she came by, crying because he had left her. What do you want me to do to him? Abuela said to the girlfriend each time. He’s a grown man, now. He don’t listen to nobody, anyway. The third time the girlfriend came by, before she could state her complaint Abuela stopped her, didn’t even invite her in. You want to be with a man like that then be woman enough to accept how he treats you, she said. But I love him, the girlfriend said. Abuela closed the door in her face. Pero, lo quiero, Abuela mimicked in Spanish. Bah, Abuela said.

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