The Latin Deli: Prose and Poetry

Lydia

Lydia I haven't seen her in twenty years—then she swoops down among the relatives in black for my father's funeral. Lydia tells me she has found God in New York City. I see that she wears no makeup, her skirt covers her knees. She holds a Bible like a small black purse on her lap. My last image of her is a bird's-eye view from my bedroom window of her emerging out of a breath-steamed red Mustang that spewed her on the street like a crumpled sack in her tan coat, then cut a wheel into the night. I let her in from the forbidden date, lied to her mother on the telephone—Tia, we lost track of time, can Lydia spend the night? I take the risk of punishment myself, banished from my pious aunt's house, for the secondhand thrill Lydia had promised, the account of her despoilment. Time has made her substantial. She fulfills her blouse, strains the darts, and puts pressure on the seams. And she carries the weight of revelation like an ark on her wide shoulders. Although I search her face for a trace of the old humor, trying to lock our eyes in old conspiracies, her pupils are hard and smooth as the pebbles she used to carry in her purse to signal her homecomings from sin by throwing them at my window. As payment she'd bring me a venial harvest in the smoke smell of her hair, a hotel ashtray, matches advertising easy money schemes, and once—a man's handkerchief with the initialsof someone I could never look again in the eye at family reunions. Lydia's winks across our living rooms were a coded key to secrets we shared. He is everywhere , she says now, and I half expect her to produce proof out of her large handbag; tangibles, as I called the artifacts she brought me from her forays. Instead she digs out a small book of psalms and sets it down between us on the sofa. She takes her leave with a quick hug and a blessing and rushes out of my house, giving me what she still believes is all I need: a token of her experience. 87 ...