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La Reina Seventeen-year-old Victor loved his beautiful, troubled mother, who wasn’t like any of the other mothers AN EXCERPT FROM SUSAN STRAIGHT’S LATEST NOVEL, “BETWEEN HEAVEN AND HERE.” 20 | UCR Spring 2013 His mother knew trees. Showed him how to find bees in the pepper tree trunks, spiders in the eucalyptus bark shedding long flat sheaves. In fourth grade, they studied California Indians, and Victor found a perfect piece of bark for his project. She took him to the riverbed, where the paddle-shaped cactus grew everywhere, and on the smooth green skin were cottony white insects. Their blood was magenta, a color he’d never seen, even among her eyeshadows and nail polish. She showed him how to paint the bark with designs in bug blood. She used to keep the bark picture in her trunk. The lock had been busted over and over, when people broke into it, but they threw the bark aside looking for money or rock or jewelry. Then someone got pissed when he couldn’t find anything, and he broke the bark in half and threw it on the floor. So she glued it together, and wrapped magenta ribbon from Rite Aid around each end, and hung it on the wall. No one would care about it then. And he saw her staring at it sometimes, when she lay on the couch. At each apartment, she hung it on the wall near the door. The bug was cochineal. An SAT word.
Back on the first Saturday in May, he was registered to take the SAT. His high school history teacher, Marcus Thompson, had paid for it—and he’d left ten dollars for Victor to buy the number two pencils and some coffee for that morning. “Make sure you eat,” Marcus said, awkwardly. Victor said, “We got plenty of food.” He remembered being really hungry when he was three. She didn’t come home. He sat on the balcony. Maybe Jessamine Gardens. He couldn’t remember anything except his stomach was eating his backbone. He could feel something creeping up there. Vertebrae. He couldn’t breathe and so he sat outside, and his uncle Reynaldo found him because they were looking for his mother. in school. But he knew she loved him, too, because she always bought him ramen and orange juice. Kindergarten? When he coughed really hard and finally she came home and put him in the shower with her and they sat in there all night, the moisture beading up on her hair like pearls and then collapsing into nothing. The water going inside his lungs and somehow cleaning out the burn. But now she had it down. He was seventeen. So she left ramen, orange juice (and she bought Tropicana, not that Sunny Delight shit), and pistachios in the kitchen. The staples. And most nights, she brought home the scheduled items from El Ojo de Agua. He said to her, “Shrimp burrito from the Eye?” The Eye of Water. Jesus Espinoza, this guy in AP History, said that was from a town in Michoacan, where his father was born. Some shrine. The shrimp burrito had beans, rice, cabbage, tomatoes, sauce, and fried shrimp. $3.99. It was the size of a small log. A dusty white log. And Victor ate one every Tuesday. Wednesday was fish tacos. Thursday was tamales. Friday was Chess, and Saturday she was gone until dawn. Sunday she slept. He ate whatever his grandfather brought from Sarrat — gumbo or beans and rice or ham. Always oranges. She had her part as down as she could, and Victor had his part down cold. Perfect 4.0. Registered for the May 6, 2000 SAT. Last one of the year. Everybody else would be juniors, but he could finish college apps late and Marcus would help him. It must have pissed those other moms, when their kids mentioned him. This black dude with weird hair and he’s really light so he’s like, not even really black, and his mom is, like, a crack ho—that’s just what everybody says, okay, she is—and he gets like, 97 or 98 on everything. Like, never lower. For reals. He had the secondhighest grade in the class in AP European History, the second-highest in AP US History, and the thirdhighest in AP Art History. Susan Straight talks about real places in the city of Riverside that served as inspiration for her novel. Read the interview at * * * Brown-haired girl Logan had green eyes like olives, one of those girls who wore her hair in a ponytail and it was thick and long so you could see the reason they called it that. She asked him all casual as often as she could without seeming insecure, “So what’d you get on the test?” “What I always get.” Victor loved saying that. He didn’t even have to give her the percentage. It was always 97 or 98. Mrs. Mumbles had to take off two or three points for everyone—even if she had to make up some shit about one word being awkward or you forgot a comma or a space in MLA format. But he loved Mrs. Mumbles. Mumford. Mrs. Mumbles didn’t buy into all the hype, and the old families and fundraisers and the right mom or wrong mom at Back to School Night. She never looked any of them in the face. She stared at some spot in the room and mumbled about funeral art of India and Impressionists and Cubism. She didn’t give a shit that Victor’s mother, who came to Open House because he’d told her it was the last time she could ever do that, sat in the back like the most beautiful zombie statue in the history of the world. She was luminous. In winter, the nights shitty MAGAZINE.UCR.EDU and cold, her skin got dulled like the gold-leaf frame of a painting if soot and years laid a patina of darkness or haze. Then she would sleep for two days, and when the sun came out, they’d go out to the orange groves. Eat gumbo and oranges, see the grandparents, and she’d take a long shower and put almond oil in her hair. She’d be gilt again. And the other moms at Open House hated the way she gazed bemusedly at their fleece vests and mom jeans for two seconds before dismissing them and staring at the paintings on the classroom walls. The SAT plan was to get number-three scores. Logan had taken it twice, Amitav three times. Logan got a 1500, perfect score, and Amitav 1490, in October. Victor didn’t have the money in October, and in November she got pneumonia after a cold windstorm when she stood in the alley too long. His aunt Famine helped him one weekend with vocabulary words. He chanted to himself all day and most of the night. Luciferous. Loquacious. Lucid. Lucent. Susan Straight is a distinguished professor of creative writing at UCR. “Between Heaven and Here” is her eighth novel. UCR Spring 2013 | 21
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