12.
OUR CANDLE SHOP HAD BEEN OPEN A MONTH THE DAY a white girl with dreadlocks ducked in. “Are you Ariel?”
“I am.”
She smiled, already pleased with herself. One of her front teeth was broken in half. “Well, well,” she said. “I just thought you should know. Your girlfriend, Sol, is leaving notes for Bipa at the mime school.”
“Excuse me?”
“You know the master mime? Bipa?”
“Sure,” I shrugged like I couldn’t care. “I know who she is. I didn’t realize she still lived in Santa Fe.”
“Yeah,” the dread girl said brightly. “Bipa moved back here last fall. She lives in that earthship at the edge of town.” She looked around at all the candles like she’d just noticed them. “Cute shop. Well, good luck.”
Santa Fe suddenly felt small like that, everyone hungry for some fresh morsel of gossip or betrayal.
“Thanks?”
But the dread girl was already gone.
Bipa.
Amy Winehouse sang from the iPod behind me.
I picked up the phone, called the café across the street and ordered a soymilk latte and a pile of enchiladas without cheese. Maybe I just needed some calories and some caffeine.
“Red or green chile?” the barista on the phone wanted to know.
“Christmas.”
“You got it, honey.”
I recognized her voice. The girl with the neck tattoos. But it was one of the waiters who stepped into the shop ten minutes later with my plate of enchiladas. “I could use your help,” he whispered as he set the plate on the counter. “My girlfriend. She may be cursed.” He had smooth skin and a boyish smile.
I hated to think his girlfriend was cursed. Hated to have him believing that. “Why do you think that, Amador?”
He looked over his shoulders, made sure we were alone. “I can’t get her pregnant,” he confessed. “She really wants to get pregnant. Do you have a candle for that?”
I pointed him to the hummingbird candles. “Light that pink one. She could also try acupuncture.”
Days at the shop were like that. Just waiting to see who’d come in next and what they might want or need.
THE DOOR OPENED. A woman with gray hair walked in carrying a cardboard box, set it on the counter in front of me. “Will you sell these candles I made?” She took a seven-day candle from her box. Onto the glass holder, she’d glued an interesting color Xerox collage of an old witch in front of her house on chicken feet. “Are you acquainted with Baba Yaga?” the woman asked. She had a little bit of a mustache.
“Sure,” I said. “The old hag who flies around in her mortar kidnapping children?”
The woman with the mustache frowned. “Dear goddess, Baba Yaga is much more than that. She helps people on their quests. She inhabits the worlds of both life and death. She offers guidance to lost young souls. Think of the old Russian story Vasilisa the Wise. Of course Baba Yaga requires that Vasilisa works for her, serves the irrational, sorts the poppy seeds from the dirt, prepare her feasts – but Vasilisa completed her tasks without asking too many questions, without asking the wrong questions, and she was rewarded with light and wisdom. Vasilisa got a better life.
“All right,” I said. “I’ll take a dozen.”
“You won’t be disappointed,” the woman promised as I forked over twenty four bucks.
THE DOOR OPENED again. My landlord. He wanted the rent.
No problem.
So I was sitting there eating my enchiladas with Christmas and writing the check to my landlord when my mother threw open the French doors.
When my landlord looked up at her in intricately embroidered Mexican cottons, his mouth kind of fell open.
“Ariel? As loath as I am to admit it,” my mother announced. “I may owe you an apology.”
I couldn’t recall my mother ever apologizing to anyone for anything. But who knew? Maybe my mother was experiencing some late-life transformation. “How do you figure?” I asked.
My landlord stared at her. Here was my mother, the very last modernist turned frail old woman.
She looked into him.
His hair was white, too. He wore a bolo tie. “Is that you, Eve?”
She cocked her head to the side. “Are you?”
He nodded slowly. “Far, far out.”
I pushed the rent check toward him, closer to the edge of the counter, wanted him to take it.
One of my creative writing teachers used to say that when an object passes between two people in a story, you should slow the narrative down because it’s more than an object passing between them, it’s energy.
But before I could slow down the narrative, my landlord pocketed that check and scurried out of my shop like some so-busted teenager.
My mother bowed her head and whispered, “That man dropped a lot of acid with your father in the sixties.”
I nodded. “I’ve heard.”
My mother looked disoriented for a moment, then refocused. “I’m too tired to stand, Ariel. Don’t you have a chair?”
I pointed her to the too-big Mexican equipale in the corner and she collapsed into it. “Nobody knows how sick I am,” she sighed. She shook her head, then started to cry. “Nobody knows how scared I am, Ariel. All I’m asking is that you do what you said you’d do.” She buried her face in her small manicured hands, then straightened her back, seemed to compose herself. She stood up, stepped to the glass counter and leaned across it toward me. “Tiniest, I’m only asking that you come and live with me and help me even the slightest bit. I don’t ask very much, do I? I have stage four cancer. I’ll be dead in a few months. I don’t want to be any trouble, Ariel. I’ve spoken to a Jungian analyst about all of this and he tells me you’re angry about your childhood and that’s why you’re abandoning me and, Ariel, I’m sorry about that. I would take that on if I had the strength. But your need for revenge is more than I can handle right now. Please just let that go and help me?”
My heart went out to her. It always did. But I didn’t know what to say. Maybe it would be a good time to explain my point of view? Lyle Lovett was singing on the player behind me and my mother seemed authentic in her pleading rant. I stood up straight. It seemed important to have good posture when trying to confront my dying mother. “I sold my house,” I started. “I packed up my family. I came here. When I was en route, you emailed me not to come. But, see, I’d already sold my house. When we got here, the duplex we’d bought together wasn’t a duplex anymore. And it wasn’t inhabitable. I couldn’t even park my trailer outside because you didn’t get a building permit. I have to say – I’m having the hardest time seeing all of this as my abandonment of you.”
I swallowed hard.
“God.” My mother flung her head toward the counter like she was really going to bash her forehead into the glass, but she stopped just short, straightened back up, looked me in the eye. She had dark eyeliner tattooed on. “Ariel,” she said gravely. “I cannot believe you’re 40 years old and you’re going to make this about you. Fine. I’ll give you the name of the analyst. I’ll stop seeing him myself. Will that make you happy? Get some much-needed analysis? That’s fine. Just move in. We’ll have a functional kitchen at some point. In the meantime there’s a perfectly good camping stove in the backyard. One of the bathrooms is now enterable. You know how loathe I am to ask you for anything, but pitifully, Tiniest, you’re all I have.” She took a piece of paper out of her purse, unfolded it and placed it on the counter next to the evil eye beads. It was a Xeroxed picture of a generic female body and it had red dots of various sizes drawn on it; a doctor’s name in the corner. She pushed it across the counter. The moment when I’m supposed to slow the narrative down. “These are the tumors,” my mother said. “These are the lung tumors we already knew about.” She pointed to the red dots around the Xeroxed figure’s lungs. She pointed to the red dots in the figure’s liver. “But it’s metastasized to the liver, and,” she pointed to the figure’s head. “The brain.” She looked at me now, placed her finger on her left eyebrow. “I have a brain tumor. I can feel it from the outside. Touch it?”
I didn’t touch it.
“Ariel, as hard as this is for me to say, I would love to be allowed to share my last dying months with Maxito. If you insist on bringing that control freak, Sol, well, fine. It’s just a couple of months. This is all I’m asking of you.”
She shook her head when I didn’t answer. “Why don’t the three of you just come over to the house tonight. We’ll watch Dark Passage, the Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall film.”
“All right,” I agreed. “Sure.”
But I already knew we were sunk for more than movie night.