Sunshine
—The park, the woman’s voice says in Tina’s ear. —I got your name from someone at the park.
Tina ducks down the aisle, phone clamped between her shoulder and her ear, multi-tasking in a way that— oh, for about two-point-three seconds!—reassures her of her competency. See, it’s good that she’s here. She’s doing the right thing.
She’s waiting for Mami’s prescriptions. She also has a list in her hand, of things her mother wants — solvents, unguents, effervescents. The effervescents are for her mother’s partial plate, a cross she has to bear about which Tina had managed to know nothing until a couple months ago. A particular flavor of Chapstix — Tina’s selection on her last trip, which smelled of a sort of generic berry, had been wrong, wrong, wrong. She’s back to exchange it. The woman’s voice goes on and on in her ear.
“Mmm,” she says, noncommittal.
The woman’s voice gathers speed. She got Tina’s name from a woman at the park. She herself also lives — at the park. The pharmacist looms over the shelf of personal care products that barricades him from his customers. He beckons to Tina.
“Make sure she takes this with food.” His expression conveys how doubtful he is that someone like Tina has any business having drugs such as these — powerful, lethal — in her possession. It dawns on Tina which park the woman is talking about.
She means one of the mobile home parks on Highway 77, where double-wides sit in rows like blocks set down by a particularly, peculiarly, neat child. The woman lives in the park. She got Tina’s name from another woman who lives in the park. Who got it from another woman, who lives in another park. She wants to know if Tina is interested, in one morning a week’s work. In the park. “Straightening up,” she says.
“Tuesdays and Thursdays Home Health is with my mom. I could come one of those days. But I can’t be away much more than two hours,” Tina warns. “How big is your place?” She won’t say house. House implies a permanence the acres of RV parking and aluminum-skirted trailers flanking Business 77 lack.
“Not very big,” the woman says. Is Tina free next Tuesday?
“Yeah,” Tina says. She’ll be there.
*
The property turns out to be the most unparklike place Tina has ever seen. But as she sits in her idling car at the gate barricading its entrance, she finds she sympathizes with her future employer. What else is there to call this place? Sealed away from the adjoining properties by chainlink, it sits between the sort of huge gas station that used to light up the night like a spaceship and a swath of used car lot, the twists of tinsel above it trembling in the warm breeze. The gas station must have gone out of business since the last time she drove out this way. The baking asphalt that aprons its pumps is already weed-pocked.
Damn the torpedoes, she’d told herself a year ago, imagining taking this very same highway out of the Valley. No looking back! She’d planned to use it as a quote under her postage stamp-sized senior portrait in the yearbook.
Now that yearbook, and that senior portrait, in which she wore a garish red drapery binder-clipped up her back to approximate the idea of a formal gown, are Tina’s past history. And she is still here. Her mother gave her worse than the stink-eye for considering a swear word in her high school epitaph —no, epigram. She chose Ad Astra Per Aspera instead.
Ms. Hargrove, the AP Latin teacher who wrote Tina all those recommendations to UT-Austin — not UT-Pan American or UT-El Paso, not even UT-San Antonio, Ms. Hargrove begged when Tina first stood at her desk with her half-completed applications back in November— had wept with happiness when she opened Tina’s yearbook to sign it. Three cheers — for three years of Latin, for being a good girl, for learning dead languages.
Tina stares through the windshield, waiting for her soon-to-be employer to show up and let her in the gate. Sunshine Estates probably used to be some family’s backyard orange grove. Now its only harvest is these rows of squat houses that end abruptly at the wet dip of a resaca and, beyond that, a melon field. Pale orbs loll against the green, cantaloupes, probably. The sheen of water glints off the furrow of the resaca.
“Are you Tina?” A woman knocks gently on her window. “I’m Mrs. Johansson.” She raises the white plastic oblong in her other hand and waves it in the direction of the gate, looking apologetic. “I have to use my clicker to let you in.”
This chainlink fence must be the letter of the law that allows Sunshine Estates to call itself a gated community. With a wheeze, the gate begins its rattling slide back, and Mrs. Johansson slips the remote into one pocket of her modest shorts. She comes around the front of the car to get in the passenger side at the exact same moment that Tina, without thinking, hits the gearshift out of park. Because Tina still — mainly — has her foot on the brake, the car doesn’t roll more than an inch or two, doesn’t do more that goose Mrs. Johansson, but all the same, Mrs. Johansson jumps.
“I am so so sorry!” Tina says.
And she really is — Mrs. Johansson is in really good shape, but all the same, sag and varicose veins mar her bare legs.
“No harm.” Mrs. Johansson settles herself in the passenger seat. “Hang a left up there on Iowa.” She flaps her hand toward the RVs that sit on both sides of the road. “All French,” she adds. “From Quebec. The dollar is weak.”
But they’ve already left the RVs behind. “Park homes,” Mrs. Johansson says, looking out the window as Tina makes the turn onto Iowa Street. Tina examines them. As far as she can tell, park homes are just RVs turned into part of the landscape by adding wooden skirting around them. The park homes carry their apparent emptiness — the windows facing the street are shuttered by blinds or thick curtains or awnings — like chips on their shoulders. Wooden signs dangle from the mailboxes at the end of each poured concrete driveway.
Bet and Wally Sanderson, Minneapolis, MN
Lorraine and Clyde Wabash, WI.
“You have to be at least fifty-five. To live here. One couple, the wife was just fifty-one. They had to petition the Board before they finally got permission to move in. I’m on it,” Mrs. Johansson adds. “The Board.”
Tina’s own mother is fifty-one. Tina tries to picture her petitioning to live in this place.
“There it is.” Mrs. Johansson lays a hand on Tina’s arm.
The yard in front of the house is sodded not with grass but with asphalt. The name Lassie Johansson swings from the crosspiece of the mailbox. The first and last name routered into the wood are incongruous after the run of coupled names receding down Iowa Street behind them.
Tina steps around the car to retrieve the caddy of cleaning supplies and the vacuum she keeps there. She already learned not to trust her clients’ own appliances, which tend to be elderly themselves, as well as clogged with hair. She brings Mami’s.
The irony of the work she has taken up is not lost on her, nor on her mother, but her mother has bigger fish to fry these days than how Tina chooses to spend her couple of free hours every week. Tina just keeps her fingers crossed, hoping she won’t wheel around a corner and down an aisle at HEB some night to come face to face with Ms. Hargrove, who would be brought particularly low by the news that her favorite, her star pupil, is still here in the Valley cleaning houses. Tina knows it wouldn’t console Ms. Hargrove that her people, as she has started thinking of them, pay her cash, and off the books. Or that her arms have gotten muscular, that she likes the calluses gained on her right hand, just below the fingers. How can she explain? Her body is strong and reliable and healthy and when she cleans, she tucks the round lozenges of her Ipod’s earbuds into her ears and works her body like you would a machine: unthinkingly.
She starts up the driveway. The air blowing off the resaca carries the acrid smell of fertilizer toward them. The fronds of the single palm tree in the otherwise completely asphalted-over yard crinkle constantly, a sound she has always equated with home.
*
Inside, it’s clear Mrs. Johansson doesn’t actually need a cleaning person. Tina isn’t about to let on that she sees this. Mrs. Johansson leads her from one room to another. Tina should just call her Lassie. She and her husband moved down to the Valley five years ago, from a little town near Chicago.
“Cold,” Tina offers, politely.
“Cold,” Mrs. Johansson agrees. They pause in the living room and she reaches out to pat the flank of the sofa.
When Glory had called Tina back in July, Tina had been packing up for school, because just what else should she do with her summer? The strain in Glory’s voice told her everything she needed to know. Her older sister was calling her with her daughter hoisted up on one hip. It had only been two months since Josh had been deployed for the second time. Neither Tina or Glory had to say what was already clear — there was no way Glory could drop everything and come back home. “Apparently, she was thinking she’d just drive herself to M.D. Anderson for her first round of chemo once you headed up to Austin. Can you believe it?”
Tina could not. Or actually, she could, she could believe Mami would do something like that because they all knew, it was so obvious, their mother was from a much stronger generation that they were.
Mrs. Johansson leads the way back into her kitchen. She stops in front of the counter and reaches out to press the pad of one fingertip onto the single crumb that mars the countertop. She flicks her fingers decisively over the sink. “How much?”
Mrs. Johansson is proud of her house, Tina knows. It’s pristine, unblemished. The only thing Tina can do that might improve it is make sure the twin tracks of the vacuum cleaner’s wheels indent the pile of the carpets whenever she finishes a room. But if she gives Mrs. Johansson a lower rate, Mrs. Johansson will brag about it to all her friends in the park, and they’ll all expect the same price.
“That much?” Mrs. Johansson says, predictably. She stares out the window. An old man doing yardwork is lowering himself toward the single spiderweb of crabgrass that has managed to make its way up through the pea gravel next door. Tina and Mrs. Johansson watch him yank at the green tuft; one, two, three times. He staggers and straightens. Tina knows Mrs. Johansson is thinking that somebody who snuck across the border would do the exact same thing for her, just cheaper.
Tina will never call this woman Lassie, no matter what she pays her.
“All right,” Ms. Johansson says.
*
“You work that phone like a rosary!” Tina’s mother jeers good-naturedly from the bed. Lately, Tina has been camping out on the overstuffed chair beside it at night. Even though her mother usually doesn’t want to talk. Her mother has never wanted to talk, not really. Sometimes Tina can’t tell if her mother wants her there at all. But if she’s got to sit somewhere in the house, sending texts and killing time, she might as well sit by her mother’s bed as anywhere else.
She bends her head to her phone, letting her hair fall like a curtain around her face. Tap tap tap go her thumbs. Such an entrancing rhythm. It takes her elsewhere.
“Mija. Who are you talking to? A boyfriend?”
“Just Caren,” A few weeks ago, Tina offered to lug the TV into her mother’s bedroom, but her mother had said she’d damn well walk into the living room if she wanted to watch television. And, the past few days, she hasn’t even wanted to do that, or bothered with the shuffle that grates so much on Tina, that makes her want to remind —who? The universe? — that this elderly woman hugging the wall in the hallway isn’t her mother.
Her mother turns her head and lies looking out the window. The sunset through it is a garish smear. The sky above the shallow cant of the roofline of the house next door seems excessive.
“Mija.” Her mother barely opens her eyes. “Go on, go out for a little bit. I’ll be fine.”
*
So now Tina and Caren and Marina are sitting crammed together in a booth at Sbarro’s, divvying up slender fingers of pizza, the same way they did every single Saturday night in the spring, when still Tina thought she’d be heading up to Austin in just a few months. The boys —three of them — are in the booth behind theirs. One of them turns around, draping an arm over the back of the booth.
“‘Sup?” he asks. Before Tina knows it, Caren is handing over her phone, so they can see pictures she took back on on Senior Skip Day. The waitress standing against the wall eyes them sourly.
“What about it?” one of the guys says, leaning over the booth.
Caren looks at Tina, raises her eyebrows. Such an obvious telegraph. No way.
Would Tina get into a car with these boys if they were about to head for the beach instead? Would she step out of her clothes and leave them in a puddle on the sand? Would she squeal as she jumped over the breakers and then waded out into the blank, black, foreign space that is the Gulf?
Doubtful. Back in May, their entire senior class took a field trip to the National Seashore with its visitor’s center that displayed the crap that washed up on the beach. Bleach bottles from Holland. Ropy skeins of netting. Enormous wooden spools for telephone cable, from which wicked-looking rusty spikes protruded. Besides, Tina knows what kind of trouble you can get into when you take off your clothes.
But the beach is not where these boys propose to go. “Sure,” she says. Because one of them is looking straight at her like — I know you. I know you won’t. I double-dog dare you. She’s surprised he even bothered to give her a first look.
*
The boys have done this before. Done what? As she walks out of Sbarro's with them, Caren’s disapproving gaze burning her back, their explanation unravels into guffawed incoherence.
Somebody’s father is a landscaper, the one with the acne-pocked face explains. By now they’re standing at the farthest reaches of the parking lot, the mall humped and low-slung behind them. The sky is thick with stars, even in the glare of the sodium lights. Ten rows ago, the four of them stepped over the yellow line painted onto the asphalt that separates the parking spots of the shoppers from the parking spaces of the people who serve them. The shorter boy works at Spencer’s; the three of them spent the previous weekend doing Whip-its they bought there, had — it doesn’t matter. Tina stepped over the yellow strip painted around Valley View Mall like some high tide line, so now she’s in the no man’s land of its employee parking next to a battered Toyota. The short boy — who likes her or wants to like her— steps toward her, away. “Sick,” he says cheerfully. She backs away.
But as she actually knows, sick is a good thing. “Totally sick,” he muses. Somebody’s dad is a landscaper and that somebody had to spend his spring break out at one of the parks that sat on Highway 77. Blowing and mowing and going.
“Every garage unlocked,” the short boy explains. “Every garage with a golf cart.” He opens the back door of the Toyota with an unthinkingly chivalrous gesture.
Tina’s mother wouldn’t let Tina take a job at the mall. Wouldn’t let her? Had persuaded her otherwise. “Your job is school,” she told Tina when she started junior year, the same job her mother had made possible for six children already. She could do it for one more. Though even then, she’d been tired, a tiredness that recently had fallen into place — click. The last piece of a puzzle.
Tina’s slide into the backseat feels like a betrayal. Of what? Nothing. Everything. The short boy squeezes in beside her and she leans across him to pull the door closed.
*
All wrong, her heart sings out, joyously. All wrong. All wrong to be the single girl in a car taking turns just a little too fast, a car with a tinted eyebrow and the radio turned up loud. The upper level of the highway curves and straightens, takes them past recently-enlarged Valley Baptist Hospital. A joint is being handed off, front-to-backseat. Tina shakes her head, passes it across. It is all wrong, for a good girl to be in a car like this. She wants her thoughts clear. She stares out the window as the blonde boy at the wheel cuts across two lanes to head for the sloping exit ramp. In the crook of the concrete sits the dark warehouse where packers used to set tissue-wrapped grapefruit into shallow shipping boxes. Rio Reds that sucked sweetness from the gray dirt, better than anything out of Florida, a point of Valley pride.
The driver parks the car at one side of the used car lot, and then they slip one by one through a gap in the chainlink that surrounds Sunshine Estates.
“Like commandos,” the short boy leans over and breathes in Tina’s ear. The acne-scarred one leads them single file down the darkened street. He is the one, she realizes, who must have spent spring break mowing grass here with his landscaper father. Although, judging from the yards they pass, he must not have had to do much actual landscaping.
The other boy, who hasn’t said much, is like her, just along for the ride. Pea gravel in the flowerbeds in front of the houses palms, then passes back, the glow from the streetlights. The darkness rustles with hundreds of small things. Wind like the sough of the sea in the palm trees. There’s nowhere to hide, if headlights come along the street to rake them. She is throwing her life away. Not necessarily, but maybe. At the thought, she grabs the shorter boy’s hand and pulls him close. He leans in toward her.
“Here,” his friend hisses, up ahead.
He stops in front of a house that is more garage than it is anything else. The front door is an afterthought, off to one side. This dark oily space where three cars can be pulled abreast is where life actually takes place.
”No keys,” the boy with the acne-scarred face whispers, disappointed, after he slinks back down the driveway toward them.
Who lives here? Tina doesn’t know. Doesn’t care.
*
Taking care. It seems like such an innocuous statement. Take care, Glory had said before Tina hung up this morning. Tina is taking care of things for now, down in the Valley. Take care. Such an acquisitive phrase, as if care is something you have to reach out and grab.
Glory calls twice a day. Once, for the real report relayed by Tina, and once, when she talks to their mother. How is she eating? Sleeping? Is the weather nice? Glory seems to have forgotten the wind incessantly rustling the palm trees, the sky so pale it has stopped being blue. Mami is taking care, greedily, with both hands, because care, as it turns out, is something the world only stingily parcels out.
—It would be nice, you know? Tina said into her phone this morning, before she left for Mrs. Johansson’s. —If you and Ami could come down, I don’t know, maybe for the weekend?
Glory was silent. Something — the T.V., Tina imagined, bleated in the background.
—‘Kay, Hermana, Glory said. —You mean, like just for the weekend, right? Not like rally the troops come.
—Just come, Tina said, and then she shoved her phone into the back pocket of her shorts and walked down the hallway toward the bedroom where her mother lay in bed with one hand thrown up to shield her eyes from the glare from the window.
*
Once, not even that long ago, the Winter Texans who lived in the mobile home parks on Highway 77 were something else.
“Snow birds,” the boy with the acne-scarred face whispers in a singsong— snowbirds. Like he is calling them to him, like chickens.
Tina never thought to dislike them, but it is obvious that he has. “Don’t start it,” he commands the shorter boy, about the golf cart. “Let it roll down the driveway.”
He is riding shotgun, knees hitting the space that in a car would be the dashboard.
The garage smells of engines, of old things that have been put up in cardboard boxes. The smells seep out of the pores of the darkness. Back in July, Tina packed up her yearbooks and every single sheet of lined notebook paper she’d ever gotten back with a red A scrawled at the top. She imagines the same sorts of things inside the boxes she can only dimly make out along the garage walls. Just more curliqued, as befits the souvenirs of an older generation.
Back in July, she’d packed up her bedroom, certain of the future, placing blocky commemorative felted letters on top of the stack of papers. The pleasure she felt as she sealed the flaps of the box had been shot through with nostalgia. Newspaper Club, Yearbook Staff, Track Team. She’d never been good at the sprint, was a long distance runner. So far these things had meant much. They were about to mean nothing. The thought brought her joy.
The golf cart is a 4-seater. “The Cadillac of golf carts,” the short boy says in a low voice.
He takes the seat beside her. The blonde silent one feels for the ignition like a blind man, running his hands over the dangling keychain left there. He fumbles for the brake. The short boy takes Tina’s hand as the golf cart begins to roll backwards.
*
“Tina,” her mother had said softly when Tina walked into the bedroom after work at Mrs. Johansson’s. The late afternoon light fell through the half-open blinds and striped the foot of the bed. Her mother twitched her feet as if to toss it off. “Would you brush my hair?”
It was still luxuriant black, not even shot through with gray. Tina sat down on the edge of the mattress, her mother’s old silver-backed brush in one hand, and began to brush. Her mother shut her eyes and sighed. The hairbrush was awkward in Tina’s hands, knocked against her mother’s temple.
“Don’t go back.” Her mother didn’t even bother to open her eyes. A pulse beat in her forehead, a small flutter, blue-ish.
“Don’t go back where?”
Beneath the coverlet, her mother kicked at the bar of sunlight falling against the foot of the bed. The house surrounding them was full of tiny sounds — the tic of the refrigerator, the sigh of the air-conditioner as it, once more, wheezed on. The heat outside could be measured by how quickly the compressor cycled from off to on, and off again. “That job you took. All of them, in fact.”
Tina lowered the hairbrush. “I can’t just not show up.”
To do so would fly in the face of everything she had ever been taught. By who? By this woman holding up a hand as if warding off a blow from the hairbrush. All her life Tina had been taught: dot your Is, Tina, sweetie; Cross your Ts. Clean up. Be a good girl. Take care.
Her mother shrugged and slid further down in the bed, leaning her head back against the pillow.
*
The silent boy turns the key in the ignition of the golf cart, suddenly silent no longer. His shoulders shake, convulsed with what Tina realizes is laughter.
“Quiet,” hisses the other one in the front seat, the one with the acne-scarred face. He lifts himself up so he can feel in his back pocket, holds another tapering joint up to the light cast by the streetlight and fingers it straight. The resin crackles as he lights it.
From one of the adjacent yards comes the hollow clanging sound of metal on metal. The driver eases his foot from the accelerator; the joint is quickly cupped in the palm of a hand, a practiced gesture that obscures the glow of its coal. Tina gazes at the houses lining the street, the white tongue of each driveway. The metallic sound rings out again, and then once more.
A length of chain is flaying a metal flagpole with the rhythm of the wind as they roll past the first house, then the next.
“All clear,” the boy beside her says. The driver mashes his foot down.
*
Tina could have predicted this, easy: the golf cart behind her, nosed into the resaca at the edge of Sunshine Estates. She and the short boy run across the dark irrigated field beyond it, stumbling in the dusty furrows. The boy with the acne-scarred face and the other one took off in the opposite direction the second the golf cart hit the ditch and tipped over and lights in the houses behind it flashed on. They turned and doubled back along the straight spine of the street— Iowa? Wisconsin? Ohio? —a move Tina already understands will be their downfall.
The grapefruit standing at the edge of the plowed field closest to the highway, its glossy dark leaves gone pale with dust, is a miracle. It draws her and the short boy like a beacon. They stop to catch their breaths underneath it.
Citrus takes too much tending, too much care, her mother insists. It’s too susceptible to frost, too prone to rust and greening. Everyone knows the future of the Valley is in sorghum and cotton, so what that you can’t eat them.
Tina stoops over, puts her hands to her knees. Takes one deep, harsh breath; another.
Her mother made the workers from the tree service cool their heels at the curb in front of their house while she searched through their last orange tree’s branches and handed Tina the fruit she found, watching the way she cupped it for a second before she dug in her thumbs, through peel and pith, to the juicy pulp.
What have Tina’s intentions ever been? Ad Astra Per Aspera, she chose as the caption to go beneath her face in the yearbook— it feels like eons ago. From the dirt to the stars.
What on earth did she think that meant? When she was little, the Valley was melons her grandfather sold from the bed of his pick-up parked on the highway shoulder.
She and the short boy exchange a glance. “Dumbass has the keys to the car.” He squints across the field. “We’re stranded.” He squats. “We probably better just lay low a little while and then start walking.”
“Probably,” she agrees. Her squat mirrors his.
“I’ll make sure you get home, ‘kay? Is it too far to walk?”
“Not far.” What have her intentions ever been? To clear out fast; to be long gone. To move past the fields that used to be row after row of trees with boughs bent nearly to snapping with gaudy orange fruit, which now only contain an occasional solitary sentinel, like this one.
