The Gifted Gabaldón Sisters Read online

  “Yeah, right,” Rita says.

  That Saturday, Rita rides the bus into Sebastopol with the other corps members. Most can’t wait to blow their small stipends eating out, drinking if they have ID, or shopping in overpriced specialty stores that fill in the touristy, wine country town, but not Rita. She hoards her money, though she will treat herself to a movie at the discounted matinee price and buy herself a burger afterward. These outings never cost her more than ten dollars. Except for laundry funds, the remainder of her pay she socks away, literally knotting the bills into an old green sock, which she keeps in her footlocker.

  After eating, Rita hikes back to the kiosk, where Rafe has parked the bus, waiting to return the six o’clock group to camp. At nine and midnight, he returns to pick up corps members who want to stay out later. Rita is usually the only one to board the early bus. She likes having it to herself, except for Rafe, a slender black man, who respects her privacy on these companionable, but silent, rides from town.

  This afternoon, though, someone else is sitting up front, just behind Rafe. The two are chatting. Rita avoids the other passenger’s eyes, but nods at Rafe and makes her way to the back. Rita flips through a shoppers’ circular she’s picked up as she listens in on their conversation. Rafe whistles, pointing out a dark green Lincoln parked across the street. “Now, there’s a sweet car.”

  The guy shrugs. “It’s all right.”

  “You wouldn’t want a car like that?” Rafe says.

  “Why would I? I got myself a nice candy-apple red Corvette with a V-8 engine.”

  Rafe shakes his head. “Get out of here!”

  “Just got it from my old man, for my eighteenth birthday,” the guy says.

  “You expect me to believe that?”

  “It’s true.” Dusky sunlight reddens his ears, which stick out slightly from his head. Rita spies a manufacturer’s tag peeking from his collar and longs to tuck it in.

  Rafe churns the engine and the bus rumbles from the kiosk. They ride in silence for a few moments.

  “No lie,” the guy insists. “I do have a ’Vette.”

  “Your dad must be a millionaire,” Rafe says.

  “That’s right,” he says.

  Rafe turns to give him a suspicious look, and Rita gasps as the bus wanders over the yellow divider. Rafe steers back into the lane.

  “Ever hear of the Silicon Valley?”

  “What about it?” Rafe says.

  “My dad and some buddies started that. They made shitloads of money. Before my parents got divorced, we were living in Beverly Hills.”

  “Only one house, huh?”

  “No, but that’s where we lived most of the time. We have one in Marin, too. That’s where I live now with my mom. We got a mansion there, twenty bedrooms, an indoor pool, hot tub, and sauna. It’s on about five hundred acres.”

  “Yeah, right,” Rafe says.

  “It’s true.” He turns to Rita. His wide gray eyes, dense lashes, well-shaped eyebrows, and bow-shaped lips strike her as childlike, even feminine, as he appeals to her. “You believe me, don’t you?”

  She shrugs, looks away. Outside of television or films, Rita’s never before seen a face as pretty as this.

  “If you’re so rich, how come you’re stuck pulling weeds here?” Rafe asks.

  “I had some trouble, see.”

  “Why didn’t your old man pay off some judge or something like that?”

  “That’s why I’m here. It could have been a lot worse.”

  “Get out of here.” Rafe tunes the radio to a local station, cranks the volume up, and whistles along with “Hey There, Lonely Girl.” No one speaks the rest of the way back to camp.

  Later, before the sun dissolves behind the tree-line, Rita lugs her clothes to the laundry, and that movie star face stops her short. He’s perched on the aluminum bar fence before the men’s dorm. “Where you headed?”

  She lifts a box of detergent in reply and continues on her way.

  He leaps from the fence and hurries to catch up with her. “My name’s Andy,” he says. “I’m new here. Will you show me where you wash clothes?”

  Rita points ahead, and Andy follows her into the small stucco building that houses four washing machines and two industrial-sized dryers. The dry warmth of the laundry room —the soft linty-ness of it, the throaty rumble of the machines, and the perfumed fragrance of fabric softener —usually cocoons Rita cozily. But now, with this newcomer staking claim to her attention, the room’s scented snugness grows hot and cloying. And surreptitious glances at that film star face fill her with a weird sense of unreality, as though she’s in a waking dream with a celebrity she can’t place.

  “I notice you don’t talk much,” Andy says as Rita inserts quarters into two of the washers. “Hey, if I get my clothes, will you help me with the machines?”

  Rita shrugs, and he bolts for the door. She starts the washers, tossing in a cupful of soap flakes before loading her clothes. As she reaches to flick off the light, Andy reappears, bearing two stuffed pillowcases. “So how’s this work?”

  Rita indicates the printed instructions on the wall. “See.”

  Andy laughs. “So you can talk.” He stuffs a jumble of jeans, jockey shorts, white socks, and towels into a washer. “What’s your name?”

  Rita shakes her head. “Sort them, or the whites will get dingy, the colors fade. Don’t you pay attention to commercials?” She pulls his clothing out of the machine, but Rita’s not about to sort his laundry for him. “You have quarters?”

  Andy pulls a twenty-dollar bill from his wallet. “Where do I get change?”

  “Nowhere,” Rita tells him. “It’s the weekend. Nobody’s here.”

  “You have change?”

  “I can’t break a twenty.” No matter how good-looking this joker is, Rita has no intention of returning to the dorm for change.

  Andy drops his eyes, and his lower lip protrudes, prettily, as he gathers up his clothes.

  “I guess I can lend you quarters,” Rita says, relenting. “You can borrow some of my detergent. Sort your stuff, and I’ll start the machines.”

  “You know you’re really nice.” Andy grins, baring teeth lustrous enough to appear in a toothpaste ad. “You’re not like the rest of them, are you?”

  Rita slams the coin trays into the machines and sprinkles in detergent. “This one has hot water,” she says, pointing, “for the light stuff —underwear and towels. Put the darks in the other machine. That’s set on cold.”

  “You’re cute, too, in a natural way. I bet you could be a model with your height.”

  “Yeah,” Rita says, parroting Rafe’s tone, “right.” She wheels out of the laundry room and strides back to the women’s dorm.

  The next day, Sunday, Rita arrives at the canteen early for breakfast, hoping to eat alone. The malcriados are usually too hungover to show up before ten. And her head start is rewarded —no one in sight. She’s almost finished with her meal when Andy enters the dining area and grabs a tray. Rita gulps water to slosh down her last mouthful and gathers her utensils. Before she rises from the table, Andy catches her eye and grins. “Mind if I join you?”

  “I’m done.”

  “Come on. Stay and have a doughnut with me, okay?”

  Rita shakes her head. “I don’t like sweets.”

  “There’s fruit. Everybody likes fruit.” Andy lifts a crescent of cantaloupe. “How about this, or an orange?” His shining eyes remind Rita of her brother, Cary, begging her to play cards with him. She returns to the serving area, picks out an orange, and follows Andy back to the table.

  He grins. “You didn’t want me touching your fruit, did you?”

  “What if I didn’t want you to pick out my fruit?”

  “Look at that orange.” He points his fork at the thing. “It’s half green. It’s got to be hard, sour as a lemon. You didn’t want me touching it.”

  While Rita pries the stiff peel from the fruit, Andy tells her about himself. He lowers his voice
to talk about his parents’ divorce, his father’s philandering, and his mother’s lover. He mentions a young sister, her scoliosis, her dream of becoming a pediatric nurse. He even brings up an old girlfriend, tells how they “drifted apart.”

  After Rita scrapes off the last bit of peel and divides the orange’s leathery segments, Andy grabs it from her hands. “There,” he says, “I’ve touched it. Now you don’t have to eat it.”

  Rita wipes her mouth with her napkin and stands. She turns for the exit, but Andy rises and blocks her. “You’re funny, you know that? You don’t want me touching your food, you wipe your hands like a million times, and you won’t even breathe in my direction. What are you afraid of?” He grabs her hand, lifts it to his lips. “Think I’ve got cooties?” His pointy pink tongue flicks out and he runs it over her knuckles.

  Rita freezes, too stunned to move.

  “I wonder what it’d be like for you if we kissed. Germ warfare?”

  Rita wrenches her hand free, wipes it on the seat of her Levi’s. Her face burns. “Malaria,” she says. “Supposedly, you have malaria. Or is that bullshit like everything else that comes out of your mouth?”

  His smile fades. “Malaria, for your information, isn’t contagious. You get it from mosquitoes, but don’t trust my word. Look it up. I get bouts, and I have to take quinine tablets and rest. I can’t infect anyone.”

  Rita steps past him, hurrying out of the canteen.

  “Sorry I bothered you,” he calls after her, “with bullshit.”

  In the dorm, Rita quietly scrubs her hands with soap and hot water, so as not to disturb the snoring girls. Surely, there are different strains of malaria, some contagious, some not. Afterward, she reaches for her dictionary. Malaria, she reads, is transmitted by infected anopheles mosquitoes. Symptoms include chills and fever. This is just a paperback dictionary, an abridged edition at that. And even if scientists believe malaria is passed strictly by mosquitoes, they don’t know everything. New discoveries contradict common beliefs every day. Rita shivers against the cold clamminess of the dorm. She bundles up in blankets and re-reads the entry. The secondary definition interests her this time around: any foul, unwholesome influence or atmosphere —miasma.

  That afternoon, Rita calls home collect from the pay phone outside the canteen. Bette answers. “How’s Elena?” she asks.

  Bette says, “Sick a lot from day care. Germs, you know.”

  “I know,” Rita says with feeling. “How are you doing?” She worries about her sister, who’s moved back home after the petty gangster she was living with was locked up on charges ranging from dope dealing to selling stolen property.

  “Well, it sucks, of course, living back at Dad’s, and with the baby. But, what can you do? I’m going back to school, working, and saving to move out.” A match scratches and Bette inhales noisily. “I hope to get my ass out of here by fall but who knows?”

  “And what’s-his-name?” Rita asks.

  “Nothing to say.” While avid about her sisters’ lives, Bette keeps them in the dark about her business. Rita recalls her astonishment when Bette left the laid-back and genial Luis for the seedy thug she started seeing after a few years of marriage —a marriage that Bette, up to that point, had insisted was “perfectly happy.”

  “How’s Sophie?” Rita’s youngest sister is another source of concern.

  “I shouldn’t tell you this,” Bette says, “so act surprised when she breaks the news, but Sophie’s pregnant.”

  Rita nearly drops the phone. “What?”

  “Yeah, she says she wants to start a family with Harold.”

  Rita pictures a household of lanky dopes —vacant-looking blond mop tops in thick glasses. “Is she insane?”

  “When it comes to Harold, she is,” Bette tells her. “I don’t get it. The guy reminds me of a long yellow straw, something that fell out of a broom. Plus, he’s never around. He disappears for like days. I bet he’s seeing someone else. Sophie pretends everything’s great all the time, but I know stuff is up.”

  “Like what is that business going on between her and Cary?”

  “She owes him a ton of money,” Bette says. “I’m not supposed to be blabbing about this, either, but she was arrested for forgery.”

  “Forgery?” Rita is aghast. How is it she knows so little about her younger sister?

  “Yeah, she did something stupid, but it was first-offender stuff, you know, no jail time. She just had to repay the money and fines and shit, so she borrowed a bunch from Cary. Right now, that’s the least of her worries.”

  “What should we do?” Rita wonders if she should request leave and take the Greyhound down to L.A. to talk some sense into Sophie.

  But Bette says, “Nothing we can do, and you’re not supposed to know, so don’t even call. She’s nineteen now, thinks she knows it all. She won’t listen to anyone.”

  Rita has trouble imagining Sophie pregnant, and then with a child. The unreality of it makes her queasy with regret, and —though this is hard to admit —envy.

  “Hey, listen,” Bette says, “maybe me and Elena will drive up to see you. I seriously need to get away from this place.”

  “Really? Don’t get my hopes up if you’re not really coming.”

  “What’s up with you? You sound all tense.”

  “I’m okay,” Rita says, but hesitates. “I’m just, you know, worried.”

  “About what?”

  “Well, germs, illness,” Rita says. The afternoon sun has filled the booth with syrupy heat, so she nudges open the door to let in some cool air. “Malaria.”

  “Malaria? Like the disease?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Why would you worry about that? You’re not in the fucking tropics, you know. You can only get it from a mosquito bite.”

  How does everyone but Rita know all about this disease? “I know,” she says.

  “If you want to worry about diseases, you could try syphilis or gonorrhea.”

  “What’s that?”

  “It’s venereal disease. You know the kind of thing passed through sexual contact.” Since Bette’s enrolled in coursework for a psychology degree, she’s become a font of information for Rita and her sisters.

  “No risk there.” Rita breathes deeply in relief. “What happens if you get it?”

  “Basically, if you don’t get treatment —all kinds of bad shit can happen if you contract syphilis or venereal disease. It starts with like sores and lesions, but they can lead to blindness, paralysis, even dementia.”

  “Jesus!” Rita puts her hand to her throat. “Where’d you hear this?”

  “I read. I watch the news. Don’t you have television up there?”

  “In the rec room, but I never go there —too many stupid assholes.”

  “Read the paper then,” Bette says. “Yeah, if you want something scary, try venereal diseases. Listen, Dad’s going to have one big-ass phone bill.”

  “I’ll let you go.”

  “Hey, don’t worry about stuff so much, okay?”

  “I won’t,” Rita says, dredging her memory for the precious little she heard about such diseases in high school. As she heads back to the dorm, she’s tempted to drop into the rec room and flip on the news. Preoccupied with this, she doesn’t react when Andy calls her name. She doesn’t even look up until he shouts, “You in some kind of trance?”

  “I’m thinking about stuff,” she says, guiltily remembering their last conversation.

  But he doesn’t seem to hold a grudge. “What stuff?”

  Rita turns away, quickens her pace, but Andy catches up. “What do you say we take a walk or something?”

  “Nah,” Rita says.

  “What else were you going to do? Go back to your dorm and sit around? Wouldn’t you rather be out on a day like this?” he says. When he puts it like this, the thought of lying in her bunk, worrying about syphilis and gonorrhea, loses appeal for Rita. Since corps members are forbidden from hiking into the woods alone, she rarely has the chance to
roam beyond the camp. It’s been a while since she and Rennie hiked to the pond to the east. And after a week of overcast skies, this sunny afternoon feels like a reward.

  Rita hesitates as she assesses Andy. “I guess so,” she says at last. They arrange to meet by the fence after filling canteens and grabbing day packs. “Bring a swimsuit,” Rita says. “There’s a pond we can swim in.”

  Andy pulls at the waistband of his khaki shorts and peers in. “I’m wearing it.”

  Rita doesn’t say much as they trudge the hard-packed trail wending through the woods to the pond. Wind ripples through the trees and tall grass, and scudding clouds cast intermittent shadows. Gooseflesh rises on Rita’s arms and neck. Miasma, she thinks, silently mouthing the word. As if encouraged by her utterance, sooty clouds thicken overhead. Rita points to a rise. “Just over there’s a creek. We can follow it to the pond, but it looks like rain. Maybe we should turn back.”

  Andy shakes his head. “Let’s hustle. I want to see this pond.”

  As they reach the water, a light rain sprinkles from the swollen clouds. Rita settles her pack on a boulder, and Andy pulls a bottle of wine and a corkscrew from his.

  “Where’d you get that?” Rita asks.

  “I brought it from my mom’s. It’s pretty good. I think you’ll like it.”

  Rita shakes her head. “I don’t drink.”

  But after a while, she accepts a swig from the bottle, screwing her face up at the bitter taste. “You like this?” Rita frowns, but tries it again —taking small sips when he hands her the bottle —as they sit watching the mist rise from the pond. When the wine makes her cheeks hot and tongue thick, she refuses more. “Want to swim?”

  “Sure.” He tips back the bottle to drain it.

  Rita tugs off her T-shirt, unzips her shorts, and steps out of them. She has little inhibition about her long, lean body in her discreetly cut swimsuit. She kicks off her shoes and picks her way on tender feet toward the water’s edge. She wades toward the middle and dives into the chilly pond. The tarnished-looking water rises shoulder-high as she crouches, her toes clinging to slick, mossy stones. Rita spies Andy bundling his clothing under his pack. His broad back tapers at the waist above the two pale globes of his buttocks. He turns and jogs toward the pond, and Rita averts her eyes as he splashes into the water. When he emerges, sluicing water from his hair and laughing, she stands upright, ready to stalk out of the pond.