The Patch: Paloma & Her Sister

The Lesbian Patch: Paloma & Isabel

Para el habitante de Nueva York, París o Londres, la muerte es la palabra que jamás se pronuncia porque quema los labios. El mexicano, en cambio, la frecuenta, la burla, la acaricia, duerme con ella, la festeja, es uno de sus juguetes favoritios y su amor más permanente.

Octavio Paz, El laberinto de la soledad, capítulo 3

For the inhabitant of New York, Paris or London, death is the word that is never pronounced because it burns the lips. The Mexican, on the other hand, frequents her, teases her, caresses her, sleeps with her, celebrates her, is one of her favorite toys and her most permanent love.

I

Paloma Garza leaned forward in the small wooden chair, her elbows on her knees, holding her cigarette loosely between the fingers of her right hand, idly swiping through her phone. The smell of onion, cumin, and chorizo frying in the pan drifted through the screen door closed against the bugs flying in the early twilight of Isabel's back yard.

Although she didn't turn her head to verify her suspicions, Paloma knew that her sister regarded her from behind the window overlooking the sagging wooden deck and backyard with that uncomfortable mix of worry, disapproval, and jealousy.

Paloma shivered in the coolness, unused to the cool spring evenings of the new, strange place.

Her people had come from a warmer spot, further south, from Texas and before that, before her own birth, from south of Texas.

Isabel and Enrique had moved the kids up there, what, two years ago, chasing a general movement north where rumors of work and new opportunities flew like the clumps of dirt Enrique slapped from his brown canvas work pants or beat from his blue overalls.

Lonely and miserable after losing her chief support, her older sister, Paloma followed several months later. The university there offered a doctorate in comparative literature, she told Isabel. She wanted to specialize in social and magical realism in early 20th century literature, exploring the internal tensions of the imperialistic white male gaze in such works as, say, Tortilla Flats in its pseudo self-aware encounter with the oppressed other, rich with misogyny and stereotyped alcoholics.

Paloma leaned back, pulled a long drag from a cigarette already nearing its end, and idly gazed through the white gray smoke at the buds beading along the thin limbs of the witch hazel and buttonbush Enrique had planted in a row in front of the back wooden fence separating their property from the squalor of their neighbor's yard.

The climate here, too cold for his beloved agave, allowed him to explore the range of native plants in this hilly green country.

She looked up at the creaking of the screen door.

"Chinga, chica mia. You can quit if you really want to. I did."

Paloma watched Isabel suck the lozenge eternally in her mouth and said nothing. A floral dish towel hung from one shoulder, and an apron covered in flour and grease splats protected her clothes from the fury of the kitchen.

Then she shrugged.

"I don't want to."

Suddenly a shriek broke the calm, steady insect noise of the spring evening.

"¡Puta! You fucking slut, don't ever touch my stuff! Stay out of my room!"

¡Pendeja! You took my brush! That's my fucking brush, you dirty pig. ¡Mamá! Angela keeps taking my shit! Mom!"

Paloma winced at the sharp crack of doors slamming and the unmistakable smack of palm on face, but Isabel just sighed.

Enrique had not yet come home, and the girls gave free rein to every obscenity they could think of.

The mother eyed her sister's cigarette longingly as Paloma squished the end into a short, squat yellow can of Bustelo overflowing with cigarette butts.

She stood up.

Both women crossed into the kitchen.

"I can heat the tortillas in the microwave," Paloma offered.

But Isabel already had a large iron skillet ready with a pat of lard in the center.

"Pobrecita," she said. "Just go make sure the hijas haven't killed each other."

Isabel pulled the towel from her shoulder and snapped Paloma's round ass as she walked away.

"And stay out of my kitchen, chamaca blanca."

II

Paloma sat up, yawned, and stretched her arms wide.

Her sleeping partner stirred his half-sleep, not quite wanting to admit that the new day had begun.

Isabel would be getting back tomorrow.

She had gone south to check on abuela, who refused to move and insisted she could take care of the old home in the valley.

She had plenty of nietos and nietas, so many sobrinos, so many sobrinas of Paloma and Isabel around her, her sister didn't need to go.

Paloma surged with guilt, for she had not gone with her.

"It's been so long, Paloma. She'd love to see you."

"Yo sé, yo sé, hermana mía," she'd excused herself then. "It's just that. I'm so busy right now."

Her partner shifted again, raised himself up, and stretch.

The bedcovers fell to his lap, showing off his hard, muscular chest and biceps, his, and Paloma hated to say it to herself, steely abs.

But he worked at least ten hours a day, he didn't drink the cerveza with his buddies after the shift ended. Didn't sit around the house drinking and smoking.

He always kept busy, and that what's attracted Paloma to him.

Another surge of guilt.

But his cock sprang free in his lap, hard in the morning, and Paloma couldn't resist it.

"Dios mío," Enrique said as Paloma wrapped her lips around her brother-in-law's cock.

"I've missed this, baby. God, your mouth is so fucking hot."

Isabel wouldn't get back until tomorrow.

Enrique let the sisters spend the night with their friends so he could have some time alone with his wife's hot sister. Caliente. Muy caliente. La puchita caliente, as his uncles used to say.

Paloma would have to deal with the guilt later.

She took Enrique's full seven inches into her mouth, going deep to his cock-root, then slid her lips up its length, sucking on the tip. She used her right hand to jerk him into her, then repeated the process, slowly, slowly, until Enrique started bucking his hip into her face hard.

God, she loved the way he trembled in her mouth. Loved to hear him groan, a feeble cry of drawn-out agony never quite rising to its relief.

Not until I'm ready, she smirked.

You can't cum until I'm ready for it, cuñado.

She licked the tip of his cock, licking the edge of the bulb, tonguing the pisshole, then she engulfed his dick with her mouth.

"Oh fuck, Paloma. Oh fuck, oh fuck, oh fuck," Enrique kept repeated to himself, roaming one hand through her hair and pointing the lens of his phone at the top of her head in the other.

When she tasted pre-cum, she increased her sucking, driving him deeper, faster, and harder into her mouth, ramming his cock as far into her throat as she could, and when he started to cum, she swallowed part of it, then pulled out his cock to shoot the rest of his sticky white semen all over her face, enjoying the warm spew of his white seed.

The phone fell out of Enrique's hand as he yelled out and flung his body back against Paloma's pillows.

"Oh god, oh god. Oh fuck, puta. My puta, my beautiful puta."

Later, the two of them sat at her kitchen table. Paloma filled a second cup of coffee, black no cream or sugar, for her sister's husband.

"You sure about tonight?"

Enrique shook his head.

"Las hijas."

Paloma nodded. She had no choice.

III

Vaping worked, a little.

The moist clouds dissipated quickly, and the smell didn't linger like the stink of tobacco. Still, Paloma couldn't stop feeling like a minor criminal as she huddled into herself behind the tall hedge hiding the little-used entrance to the liberal arts building.

She stiffened when she heard the door open, followed by the unmistakable rustle of someone picking through the hedge.

"I thought you'd be here."

Paloma smiled, but she didn't relax.

It was just Jessica, the tall redhead from her Spanish class. But the girl had changed.

They used to gossip about boys, their boyfriends, guys they hooked up with randomly.

It might not have been exactly appropriate student-instructor engagement, but a girl had to talk to someone.

And it felt good to laugh with young women, to be reminded that she hadn't turned old; she could still swap jokes with the students.

But then Jessica went gay.

She'd see her in the halls or on campus, arm in arm with other girls, delivering slow kisses before separating to go to class.

She'd catch her from the corner of her eye.

She'd try not to stare.

Times had changed all at once, she realized. While I hadn't been looking.

Chicas suddenly in heat for other chicas.

That was something that took getting used to, as feminista as she was.

Chinga, prefiero los hombres, muchacha.

She put it down to youth, a changing culture, new rules to live by.

Then summer came and summer went, and the new fall semester arrived, though the summer heat lingered in the air, covering the days in a slow to dissipate warmth.

Jessica's red hair still waved luxurious around her freckled face, and she wore tight pink shorts and a sleeveless pink crop top exposing so much of her white skin.

I hope she wears sunblock is what Paloma thought.

"I haven't seen you here in a while," is what Paloma said.

Jessica shrugged.

"The thing is, you know. The thing is I quit smoking. For a while now. Last semester."

Palomo blew out another cloud of vape.

"I really need to quit. I've tried everything. But all I do is eat and gain weight."

Jessica swung her backpack from her shoulder, unzipped the top, and fumbled around until she took out a small, shiny pink box.

"I've tried every patch, every gum, and every vape out there. But these. These really work. They just. Help. Here, take these. They work. I haven't wanted nicotine in months."

"Did it make you want to eat a lot?" Paloma asked doubtfully.

Jessica winked at her.

"Nothing you can't handle."

IV

Paloma stared blankly at the telenovela, Mi Corazón: el Fuego y la Selva, playing out on her TV. Sor Juana Esmeralda, persecuted and chased from the Convento del Sagrado Corazón de la Virgen for her inexplicable pregnancy, had just found haven with la Mujer Salvaje de la Selva, at that moment mixing a secret herb powder to put in Sor Juana Esmeralda's tea. Her phone buzzed loudly on the coffee table in front of her. She lifted it from the table and answered the phone, hearing the shrieking of Camila, Isabel's older daughter, even without putting the phone on speaker. The shrieking didn't end until Paloma was sitting behind her steering wheel, half-way to Isabel's house, stopping only to get a pack of Reds from a gas station along the way.

Paloma didn't remember tearing open the pack, she didn't remember breaking the first cigarette as she pulled it out, and she didn't remember lighting the second cigarette with the lighter below the dashboard of her decades-old Honda. She did remember turning the windshield wiper on suddenly to clear her blurry vision. She remembered turning it off just as suddenly, embarrassed. She wiped her eyes with her right hand.

Stupid, stupid, stupid.

Enrique had been killed.

These damned hills, these damned highways around here curved so much, wound so tightly, it was bad enough going around a corner. But these idiots around here, esos retrasados de mierda, drove so fucking badly. They swung out wide to the other lane going around a corner, it took nerves of steel to drive these roads. Enrique swerved, of course, Paloma learned later, holding Camila and Angela on the sofa and nodding her head at the police officer standing in front of his little group, explaining what had happened.

The little Bobcat on the long, steel trailer he hauled behind his huge Ford flipped or jack-knifed or did whatever a fucking trailer does when the truck in front of it lurches without warning. It flipped him off the highway. And rolled him down the steep hill into a thick tree dozens of yards down, snapping his neck and killing him even before the Ford stopped rolling.

***

Later, after the police left, Paloma mustered enough nerve to call Isabel.

"No puedo hacerlo, Tía Paloma," Camila whined. "I just can't do it. You have to."

After that both girls fell silent, struck dumb and numb by the senseless finality.

Isabel, too, was quiet.

"I see," she said after a long, long period of silence over the telephone. "Let me talk to the niñas."

Angelita sat up to lifelessly answer her mother. Nothing in her wanted to talk to her right now. Nothing in her wanted to speak at all.

"Yeah?" she said.

Paloma went outside to the deck in back of the house to smoke another cigarette, the taste of the tobacco acrid and bitter in her mouth. The pack was just over half full. She couldn't remember smoking that many, but her mouth was raw.

Just that morning she had his cock in her mouth, just that morning he was spraying her insides, and now he was gone, and now she'd never taste him again. She was so cold, that bitch, she could be so cold, that bitch, and Enrique needed so much, and Palomo had given him everything, denied him no part of her body. And he had fucked her good and had fucked her thoroughly and had ridden her hard, putting her away wet, like the bitch of a mare she was.

She'd never have the hot cum from his kind and gentle body again, hard and terrible and inexplicably gentle.

His body was broken now, dead and broken.

Soon it would be buried beneath the dirt.

"John Brown's body is a-moulderin' in the grave," the words to the old estadounidense fighting song from the days of abolition and kinslaying floated through her mind. She'd heard it a few semesters ago, studying American folklore in a forgotten comparative lit seminar, and now the words returned without warning or even much sense.

She smashed the butt stub of her cigarette into a red coffee mug she grabbed from the kitchen cabinet, got up and went back inside. Angela and Camila were both gone, but she heard quiet sobs upstairs. Her phone lay on the coffee table. Paloma slumped more than sat down on the sofa, closed her eyes, and collapsed on her side.

The stars above in Heaven now are looking kindly down,

His soul goes marching on.

A flurry of loose, disjointed, and tangled thoughts flew through her mind, but eventually, eventually she fell asleep to weird and bitter dreams where naked bodies writhed beneath the gibbets of hanged American abolitionists.

V

Two weeks later, Isabel stared at the plastic bag holding Enrique's personal belongings from his Ford. She had sold the rest of the wreckage for scrap, but some items she couldn't bear to part with. A pair of worn leather work gloves, a map of the area, two postcards from Mexico, where his abuelo still lived, over 90 years old and still strong as a bull, as he liked to say when he came up for the wake and funeral.

His phone.

At first, the girls moved around the house like zombies, eyes pale and red and swollen. A few days ago, Camila started going out again, and Angela followed her. They'd come back late, intoxicated or stoned, but Isabel had grief of her own. She knew she had to snap out of it, for her own sake as well as her daughters. In the meantime she leaned on Paloma, and Paloma held her up.

But now Paloma was gone, teaching at that universidad of hers, and Isabel huddled her bones beneath the covers of her bed, unwilling and almost unable to get up. The bag of Enrique's belongings rested on the floor, just in front the folding doors of their (hers now) closet.

Paloma.

They had never really been close as sisters, not as some sisters are. Unlike so many familias, theirs had not been large. Just the two hermanas, Isabel six years older and already graduated when Paloma entered junior high. Isabel never wanted for admirers, but she met (and fell in love with) Enrique her last year of high school and married him soon after graduation.

Life moved so quick and slow.

Camila came before Isabel wanted her, but long, long after her own mother had given up home.

"Dios, cariño, you're already eighteen," she'd fret. "You want your uterus to dry up and shrivel? Make Enrique a man, cariño. Make him a padre."

At twenty she made Enrique a man, and then again at twenty-two.

It was enough for Enrique.

Strangely, Isabel thought she wanted more, but as the girls grew, she found enough to preoccupy her, and she ran her small house, and when Enrique's business grew, she ran that, too. On her end of things. Phone calls, records, bills, emails. Later, the social media sites.

But she was frugal, and though she encouraged her husband to buy good equipment for the business, she rarely allowed money to be spent on other things. They moved into a larger house, but not much larger. A better neighborhood, but still the barrio. They drove used cars and watched the odometers grow with pride. They kept Camila and Angela clothed, and fed, and in her way she doted on them, and in Enrique's way, he spoiled them.

Tía Paloma started showing up more and more often, and it was during the raising of the two daughters that the two sisters became close.

Tía Paloma, first of the family to go to college, first of the family to graduate, first of the family to get her master's degree.

She started visiting during the summers, and she learned how to help Isabel with the business, and she became a kind of third parent to the girls.

Paloma.

Isabel shifted in her bed and glanced at the photograph on the night table. The three of them in bathing suits standing on a beach in the Gulf. It was taken years ago, when Isable could still wear a bikini without fear. Paloma stood on Isabel's right, her arm around Isabel's waist, leaning her head against Isabel's shoulder, and Enrique stood on Isabel's left, his arm drooped over her shoulders and neck. They were so very close, and both women wore their bikinis well, round hips and round chests in yellow bikinis and shoulder-length brown hair.

Tits full and pendulous, cleavage tight in the cups of their bikini tops.

We used to be so hot, Isabel thought.

They looked alike, Isabel and Paloma did. The same cheeks of their mother, the same lips, the same deep olive-brown skin. Isabel stood a little taller and wider, especially at the hips, and Paloma looked finer, sharper, almost stunning where Isabel boasted a simple lovely attractiveness.

Sexy.

Lately Enrique had not been making her feel that way.

And now he never would. A sharp pang of guilt stabbed Isabel. The father of your children is dead, and you're thinking about fucking, puta?

Isabel rolled over, turning away from the picture of her dead husband, her sister, and herself, facing away from the bag holding Enrique's belongings.

Then Enrique moved them up here, up to this horrible place, and then here he died, leaving his small family alone and unhappy.

Then a soft knock tapped at her door, and Paloma stepped into her room.

VI

Paloma had also changed in the two weeks since Enrique died. Her face looked haggard and worn, dark bags hung under her eyes, which gazed dull and lustreless red at the world, detached and uninterested. The skin of her face hung loose, as if she had aged years. Night after night, day after day, she had left her crammed and shared office at the university to visit her sister, foregoing grading papers, completely putting her students out of her mind.

Everything Paz wrote about Mexicans and death was bullshit, Paloma thought. Unas mamadas. If it was a joke, it was a bad joke, one without laughter. She didn't want to dance with it, or celebrate it, or light fucking fireworks for it. She certainly didn't want it to caress her or sleep with her. She wanted Enrique himself to sleep with her. And he was gone.

Death was no pinche toy for her, puta Octavio; it burned her lips, and she hated it.