Freeze Frames Read online

  Before, behind, around each saint dance troupes of women, their loins and breasts wrapped in twists of bright cloth, yellow and orange, blue and purple, their skin glittering with spangles, their heads plumed with dyed feathers or bound round with strings of glass jewels; like birds flitting from branch to branch they twirl and kick and bob along from curb to curb. Too poor to buy their church electric generators or seats on the city council, they give dancing instead, their own flesh the offering to the word made flesh. In and among them snare drummers march in precise cadres; entire mariachi bands, their guitars and trumpets gleaming, ride by in carts pulled by teenage boys wearing white shirts and garlands of flowers round their necks. Everyone goes barefoot on the hot asphalt, all pitted, pocked, bristling with gravel. By the end of the route, their feet will be bleeding, the pain another offering to their Jesus.

  Every now and then the procession crawls to a stop. The dancers sway sideways, the drummers march in place, the trumpeters tuck their instruments under one arm and catch their breath. Girls with water bottles and wet towels rash out of the crowd to wipe the faces of the men carrying the saints and give them drinks.

  One of these intervals leaves a saint floating right in front of Tiffany. A towering woman, slender, with blonde hair but black skin, she carries a sword instead of a palm leaf. Her dress is white, and all around her on the street dance young women, their arms bare, their bodies encased in yards and yards of muslin, bleached bone-white, pleated and starched as stiff as cardboard, lashed down with ribbons at the bodice, tied down at the waist, but billowing out in enormous skirts almost to the ground. Barefoot, they solemnly jog in place, swaying a little with a rustle of skirts like the beating wings of giant insects. Tiffany leans down to bellow into Mark’s ear.

  “Who’s this?”

  “Santa Barbara,” he calls back.

  The woman next to him laughs.

  “Yansen,” she says. “The priests, they call her Santa Barbara, but her name be Yansen. She be one of the orixas.”

  Tiffany hears this name as “yan san,” as Mr. Yan, and she goggles at the vast image floating above her. Her mind simply cannot reconcile this figure that the priests call a saint with an Asian male name. The huge head, crowned in gold; the full mouth, smiling with a tight and secretive curve of lips; the huge blue eyes that should jar against black skin but that, somehow, fit; the sword, gleaming with salvaged aluminum foil, smoothed out and pressed over cardboard by devout hands—at that moment Tiffany feels that she should know this figure’s real name, just as she feels that knowing Pocho she should understand Portuguese. If she only knew the real name, everything would be at long last clear; if she could only speak this name, all her long years of combat, first in Israel, now with her own body, would at last have meaning—she believes it suddenly, fiercely. Further down the route, the music picks up; the speakers on the church steps blare in answer; the parade moves on. As her litter-bearers break into their slow trot, the orixa bobs her head Tiffany’s way in silent blessing.

  Behind her the parade thins to one last cadre of drummers, young and a little off the beat, one last swirl of dancers, glittering green and turquoise, and then, at the very end, a press of crowd, sucked into the vacuum left by the procession, drawn inexorably after their saints and gods, dragging with them the worshippers on the sidewalk as they pass. In a few minutes Tiffany can step down from her shelter and reach Mark, who automatically catches her hand.

  “Superstitious bull,” he remarks. “Pretty flash, though. Makes a great parade. But jeez, they believe it all, poor bastards. Damn priests sucking them dry. The things I saw in Brazil, Tiff.” He shakes his head hard. “Anyway, it be 1300 hours. We’re gonna be late if we dunt hurry.”

  “Damn. I did want to bring the kids something.”

  Right near the transfer point, however, where three different bus routes meet, lies an unofficial market, a spread of blankets and old sacks, each with a vendor crouched behind it on the sidewalk. A few meters up the narrow hill of Cortland Avenue, an old woman, wrapped in a gathered striped skirt and draped in a once-white blouse, trailing torn lace, sits cross-legged behind a big basket of Mexican chocolate, kilo chunks wrapped in glazed paper, each sealed and stamped with a red and green eagle. While Mark haggles, waving a handful of the rabbi’s moldy bills to show he’s serious, Tiffany kneels and unwraps one packet to check for worms and rat dirt—you never know with this semi-legal kind of provender, the brand passed for sale in America, yes, in the abstract, but this actual cache of chocolate has no doubt been smuggled across the border without inspection. Even though the smell of crushed almonds and sugar makes her mouth water, she won’t be able to taste anything if she succumbs to the temptation of nibbling. Save it for the kids, she tells herself. Amber will doubtless ration this kilo block out for weeks to come. The haggling over, Tiffany slips the block inside her bag with the wine. The old woman counts the bills, rolls them, and tucks them into her blouse with a toothless smile.

  “Did you like the procession?” she remarks in Espanol. “I thought the music was very pretty.”

  “It certainly was, yes.” Tiffany struggles with the verbs, which are much more formal in the old woman’s mouth than in the Pocho she knows. “I didn’t know who all those saints were, though.”

  “Some of them weren’t saints, that’s why.” The old woman turns suddenly sour. “Those Brazilians! Oh well, they’ll learn American ways sooner or later, I suppose.”

  When the bus finally comes, it disgorges a flood of chattering passengers, all miffed that they’ve missed the procession, then stays empty except for Mark and Tiffany. Later the church will be sponsoring a carnival of sorts, with music and bingo, a major event here in the barrio. No one’s going to leave until the celebrating’s all over.

  “We better take the long route home,” Mark remarks. “Tonight this bus gonna be packed to the roof.”

  “Uh lord, you’re right. Say, Mark? What are those orixa guys anyway, if they ain’t saints?”

  “Old African gods, come over with the slave trade, or that’s what I heard, anyway, when I was in Rio. The captain of my company, he was kinda keen on all this old stuff, folklore, he called it. The church took the orixas right in and made them saints, because the people were gonna pray to them whether they did or not.” He grins. “You could say the church baptized them, I guess. They don’t miss a trick, them priests.”

  “Kinda like voudoun, then.”

  “Yeah, a lot like that. Some of the women, they go into trances, after dancing for hours, I think, something like that, and then the orixas take them over and make them say things, prophecies I guess, I dunno.”

  “Take them over?”

  “Yeah. Lemme think. It’s like the orixas, they live in some other world, and they need a body to get into this world, and so the women let them use theirs. A lot of crap, if you ask me, but old Captain Connors, he went and watched some ceremony, and he came back real impressed.” He looks suddenly sad. “But he was a good man. And a good officer. Too damn bad, losing him like we did.”

  To the same Argentinean land mine that maimed LoDarryl, Tiffany thinks it was, but she cannot quite remember the story and she doesn’t want to depress Mark by having him repeat it. As the bus groans its way uphill, she is thinking about Nick and the rabbi. They drank coffee, they ate bread with her. They have bodies, then. Or rather, the figures she saw seemed to have bodies. Maybe they never really ate and drank; it might have been some kind of trick. Or a neurologic hallucination. All at once she doubts the reality of what she saw or seemed to see. But the waitress served them coffee. Could have imagined that, too. How could they be in her world, the Devil and a holy man dead for hundreds of years? Ger Chong sold the Devil a pack of gum. Couldn’t be. Impossible. Unless they took over someone’s body like an orixa, an idea that strikes her as so ridiculous that she laughs aloud. Mark, wrapped in some brooding about the war, does not notice.

  Tiffany’s mother lives in a condominium up on University Mound,
a middle-class village within the city. Although the entire complex stands inside high walls, studded with long blades of broken glass, the security there is a good bit more lax than it would be in one of the fortresses that cater to the rich. Although video cameras record their entry, and the uniformed guard does ask their names and make a show of looking them up on the list of approved visitors, he doesn’t bother to call up to the flat, merely waves them through the gates. Just beyond his kiosk stands a shuttle, an electric surrey with a flat bed, wood and wrought-iron benches, and a pink-and-white ruffled roof. In the back stands a Compu-drive unit. When Mark punches in the address, the surrey starts with a hum of batteries and whines off, making its way down the middle of the lanes between white buildings roofed in black solar collection panels. Although the units sport rustic shingled entranceways, canvas awnings over wooden decks, wooden shutters over the windows, and little picket fences round real lawns, they are at root the same stucco-crete cubes as the projects lining Mission Street.

  Tiffany’s mother, Mandi, lives in a flat on the top floor of the southernmost building, two cubes piled up with a third cube nestled next to them to break the stark lines. When the shuttle sighs to a stop at its door, Tiffany looks up and sees her niece and nephew leaning dangerously out of a window to wave and yell.

  “Aunt Tiff, Aunt Tiff! You can walk! You can walk!”

  “Sure can!” she calls back. “I can do lots of stuff now.”

  By the time that she and Mark have gotten off the shuttle and sent it on its way back to the gate, the kids have come pounding out the front door to surround them with the illusion of an entire pack of children. As is the case with most families these days, with so many men gone off either to war or the corporate farms of the Central Valley, Amber’s kids have different fathers, so that Rico, just four, is blond and blue-eyed like his mother and his aunt, while Maggie, seven and getting close to eight, has raven-dark hair, black eyes, and skin the color of teak veneer. They grab Tiffany for hugs, then dance around her as she makes her slow way across the entrance way and up the stairs. Mark brings up the rear, grinning and carrying the string bag.

  “We got new games,” Maggie announces. “Gramma got us new games.”

  “For the comp wall?” Tiffany says.

  “You betski,” Rico chimes in. “Space dock revels.”

  “Rebels, you dope. Not revels.”

  “You betski. And trains on fire.”

  “Say what?” Tiffany says.

  “It’s a routing game.” Maggie favors her brother with a look of massive contempt. “And if you blow it the trains crash.”

  “Gotcha.”

  At the top of the stairs, Amber and Mandi stand together, Amber’s honey-colored hair long and wild, Mandi’s chemical blonde nipped short, turned under in a tidy wave, but they are both slender women, immaculately dressed in pressed shorts, tucked shirts. In the dim light Mandi does realize her often-expressed wish and seem as young as her daughters—if not, in fact, a little younger than Tiffany with her scars and the permanent dark circles under her eyes from the medication. They smile, hug, pull everyone into the cool refuge of a white room with tan drapes, tan furniture, and artwork in muted pastels, including the portrait of Christ obligatory these days. Mandi has stripped the walls of her collection of painted china plates, probably to spare Tiffany’s fractured sight as well as sparing the plates the attentions of the kids. The empty black plastic racks hang like blank staves of music. On the long coffee table in front of the fake fireplace lie plates of food: sensible vegetables, dips, rice cakes.

  “Aunt Tiff got something in that bag,” Rico announces. “Smells good.”

  “Chocolate,” Tiffany says. “But your mom be the one who gonna ration it out.”

  “Oh no! She mean!” Maggie is grinning even as she wails. “Ain’t you, Mom?”

  “As mean as I gotta be, yeah.” Amber takes the bag from Mark. “And wine? Wow. You guys do it up right, huh? Thanks!”

  “You really shouldn’t have.” Mandi grins, just a little too broadly, and her voice is just a little too light. “You really should have left all that to me.”

  Everyone smiles, vaguely, glancing round the room with its tangible evidence that Mandi alone makes more money than a pair of vets bring in together.

  “Uh well,” Mark says at last. “Wanted to chip in something.”

  “Of course, dear. And thank you. It was very nice. We could sit down?”

  But everyone stands, hovering by the door, waiting for someone else to make the first move toward the sofas, smiling, everyone smiling while Mandi searches her younger daughter’s face, studying her every scar, checking the one shoulder that’s a little lower, maybe, or estimating how she’s doing with the bad hand, until Tiffany feels that she once again is ten years old, running off the soccer field after school to find a mother waiting who will comment on every slop of mud, every grass stain, every bruise, every indication that her daughter cares more for sports than she ever will for her studies. Rico saves her, saves everybody, from the growing silence.

  “Well, Mom, please? You gonna cut it up? Gramma, please?”

  “What, love?” Mandi wrenches her gaze away, turns a little pink as if she’s embarrassed herself more than anyone. “Please what?”

  “Chocolate. We can smell it, you know.”

  Everyone laughs, grins, moves, turns this way or that.

  “I’ll get you some,” Amber says. “You said please real nice. Why dunt you show Uncle Mark the new comp wall?”

  “Oh yes, he’ll like that,” Mandi chirps. “Gramma will come turn it on.”

  Mark and Mandi collect kids and stroll across the living room toward the door leading into Mandi’s office, where during the week she reviews disputed claims for the Veterans Administration. Tiffany trails behind her sister as Amber carries the bag into the tiny kitchen, all beige and black, each treasured appliance so shiny-clean that Tiffany has to blink hard against the fractured light. For a moment she sees faces grinning with silver teeth on every door and control panel.

  “You okay?” Amber says.

  “Sure.” She leans back against the microwave’s polarized glass door and watches Amber to avoid the glints and reflections that crowd upon her. “So, how was the trip up?”

  “Fine. The kids are getting pretty civilized these days. Only four fights in six hours, and Rico dint even get sick on the curves out of Monterey.”

  “Cool.”

  Amber puts the wine bottles into the cooler, sets the chocolate onto the counter, and hands Tiffany the bag.

  “You could take that Forty-Niner jacket off. Warm in here.”

  “Is it? Thanks.” Tiffany crams the bag into a pocket, then slips the jacket off, lets it drop automatically onto the floor, mutters, and picks it up again. “How’s the university doing? And the aggie lab? Any new projects?”

  “No such luck.” She wrinkles her nose. “Still the drought-resistant barley. Damn stuff keeps dying on us when we plant it anywhere but the Andes enviro-tank. But I did get a raise. And a new title. Senior geneticist.”

  “Congratulations. That’s great. Look real good on your office door.”

  “You bet, but we really needed the money. The housing down in San Luis is getting so expensive. Sure wish I could afford to buy a place like this, but it’s going to be a while yet.”

  “Mom dint offer to help?”

  “Course she did. But . . . well, you know.”

  Automatically they both glance at the door to confirm that Mandi’s still absent.

  “Yeah, I do know,” Tiffany says. “Gets on Mark’s nerves, but she really means well. I mean, she only wants to know she’s still part of our lives.”

  “There’s more ways of paying off a debt than with money, and I just can’t afford it. If you get what I mean.”

  Tiffany considers. As the older sister, Amber has always carried the greater part of the burden of their mother’s relentless generosity and, of course, of the unspoken contracts of grati
tude that go with it.

  “I do get it, yeah. Just kind of sad.”

  “Oh, I’d never deny that. Well, I sure hope her giving you stuff dunt cause any, well, friction, I guess, between you two. I sure do like Mark.”

  “So do I.”

  They share a laugh. Amber brings down an old plastic plate from the cupboard above the sink, rummages in a drawer, finds a knife. From a distant room comes the sound of beeps, squawks, and simulated trains, punctuated by laughter. They can guess that Mark is being shown the new games.

  “I’ll let the kids have a little candy now,” Amber goes on. “We’ll be eating later than usual, Mom says. She found a beef roast for sale somewhere, and she’s getting it cooked in the oven over in the dining hall.”

  “Hell, wish I could taste it! Trust Mom to come up with something like that.”

  They shake their heads, marvelling, as they have for years, at Mandi’s ability to find things, whether for sale or barter, all the small details of civilian life that were once mundane but are now exotic, shoved to one side in the production schedules that keep America’s profitable armies supplied. Real vinyl rain ponchos, clothes for antique Barbie dolls, metal cookie cutters, freeze-dried coffee, copper pennies for a pair of loafers, a tetherball set for the Girl Scout camp or metal paper clips for a hospital charity drive, belt buckles, computer cables, aspirin, and those little rubber tips for the feet of garden chairs—if such a thing exists somewhere in the Bay City’s vast network of legitimate stores and discount warehouses, or if it’s for sale on the street without being in a downright black market, Mandi will, eventually, track it down for a child or a close friend or a good cause, though never, by some quirk of her own, for profit.

  “Mom, Rico’s cheating again!” Maggie comes barrelling into the kitchen. “He is he is he is, and Uncle Mark won’t let me hit him.”

  Amber gives her a fractured chunk of chocolate. When the wail stops, plugged at the source, she hands over the plate of splinters and chips she’s hacked from the block.

  “Take this into the comp room and share. With Uncle Mark, with Gramma, and with Rico.”