Give It To Me. Ana Castillo

16

       Chapter 17

       Chapter 18

       Chapter 19

       Chapter 20

       Chapter 21

       Chapter 22

       Chapter 23

       Chapter 24

       Part Three

       Chapter 1

       Chapter 2

       Chapter 3

       About the Author

       Also Available from the Feminist Press

       About the Feminist Press

      Acknowledgements and Disclaimer

      I would like to thank the friends and colleagues

      who read the first draft of this story and generously

      lent their comments. Also, many thanks to Amy Scholder.

      All characters and accounts here are fictional.

      Any resemblance to actual persons is purely coincidental.

For the sake of sobriety,

      not necessarily my own.

      and

      For San Antonio de Padua

      who helped me

      in Kazakhstan.

      PART ONE

      1

      Mucho traffic and a stampede of plebes down below. Above all, Mulch. Mulch was what Palma Piedras called the wide and astonishingly ordinary middle class at the start of the twenty-first century. Horns blasting, cops’ whistles blowing, and an ambulance stuck and siren ignored. She watched them hurry against changing traffic lights in their khaki shorts, flip-flops or sports shoes, and T-shirts or cheap polos. Big, fat men dressed like five-year-olds in baseball caps. Americans were the worst dressers in the world. She was in her hometown.

      A year in Colombia.

      A letter from Pepito brought her back to Chicago. He was out of prison by the time she got the letter that said he was getting out and could she meet him? A decade locked up. Ten years, nineteen days, he wrote. Before he did what he did to get himself locked up about five minutes after he did it—the gun was still warm—she hadn’t seen him for a couple of years. During all that time she had stayed in Buenos Aires, Madrid, El De Efe, and Medellín, Colombia briefly—her ex’s native tierra, her brief husband. The woman, who’d readily admit she did life better on her own, was attracted to places where Spanish was spoken because it was her other strong language. (In Italy she understood everyone but couldn’t put a sentence together.)

      Palma changed out of shorts she’d slipped into on that humid day and tried on a summer dress from the mall back in New Mexico. She was broke but didn’t want to look broke so she hooked on her best gold hoop earrings and a gold bangle. Accessorizing her mall dress made her look more broke. She changed twice before she was back in the plaid Bermudas purchased at the Sam’s Club where Palma was buying a twenty-pound bag of dog food for her forty-pound mutt back home. Home was now Albuquerque. She had returned to Chicago, among other reasons, to meet Pepito.

      Pepito was her lil cous’, raised by their grandmother. (Little was an expression.) She and him, together. Abuela told her way long ago that Palma’s mother, the grandmother’s daughter, had been born under a bad star. That bad star led her to follow a worse guy. Not Palma’s father, the old woman assured her, although she never said who he might have been. One day Palma came to the conclusion that her grandmother hadn’t withheld her father’s true identity out of spite for her mother who dumped the girl on her after she was born, but that her abuela truly had not known who he was.

      Abuela preferred her own one and only son and treated him like a baby, still cutting meat for him at the table, useless piece of shit that he was, and that never changed even after one day while in the seventh grade Palma came home from school and there was a toddler. A duffle bag the girl didn’t recognize was by the door. Pepito is going to stay with us a while, Palma, Abuela said. He’s taking your room. My room? The girl said. Where am I going to sleep? With me in my bed, Abuela said. Palma loved Abuela but she found the idea of sleeping with a woman who left her teeth in a glass by the side of the bed a very unattractive proposition.

      Then again, her lame uncle Jim-bo (or Jim-Boy or Jimmy or Yimmy, depending on who was talking about him or to him) had started making stops at the bedroom doorway with no door late at night when he’d come home smelling like a tavern urinal. The girl had sensed the soused louse lingering and then move on. Even at twelve, and during the unenlightened days in the country’s 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