“Anyway, he has these intense, dark almond eyes, brown sugar skin, and a mass of shoestring curls piled on his head like copper wires. Like fireworks.”
“Sounds gorgeous,” Handro said conspiratorially. “Fireworks. Ay.” He fanned himself dramatically.
“We bonded over art.” She didn’t add that they’d also bonded over the struggles of parenting as a college student. But she couldn’t tell Matty that. She purposefully said nothing about Joshua’s kid to Matty. She knew how he’d react. She did say, “He asked for my number.”
“Honey, better wait and check him out first, m’kay?” Handro said. “Don’t rush into anything.” And her hopes for her ally in this battle faded.
Matty sighed louder. Bianca braced herself for a fatherly “talk,” customary between them even when Dad was alive. “Hey, Bee, look, I don’t want to spoil this for you. I love seeing you excited. But you’ve had a rough couple of years. Are you really ready to start dating?”
“Stop being so protective.” She kept her voice haughty, but her stomach coiled.
“I don’t want you hurt again. Too often you only think with your heart.”
“Anytime we open our hearts, the world opens.” She said this with as much poetic authority as she could muster and held tight to the thought of Joshua. They’d just met, but the idea of him was already blossoming inside some part of her she’d assumed ashen. His indefinable accent, somewhere between southern country and Los Angeles streetwise, the shyness permeating his politeness, his slightly dimpled smile. He was a package deal, he’d said. Him and his kid, Jayden. He’d worn a superhero watch and said it matched his kid’s, just them two against the world, and he’d sounded so goddamn sincere, like Linus in his pumpkin patch, that she could’ve sworn her heart started flowering again right then and there in the campus quad. She wouldn’t mention any of this to Matty. She’d had her fill of his lectures. What she needed right now was support. She was nervous enough. Kept fighting with herself over whether or not she deserved hope. And she needed Matty to reinforce Dr. Norris’s encouragement to get back out there and make new connections with people. Joshua seemed like the best kind of people. And she was trying. Though it scared the shit out of her. She was really fucking trying.
“It can be dangerous,” Matty said.
“So can driving, but we do that every day.” Her cheeks were hot.
“Be careful, sister. You just got back on your feet. School’s going well . . .”
“I’ll be fine, Matty. Tell him, Handro.”
“Hey, I haven’t met the guy.” Handro put his hands up in mock surrender.
“Well, I have a good feeling about him,” Bianca said. “He’s different than the other guys.” He didn’t stare at her breasts the whole time he was talking to her. Yet everything in his demeanor expressed his attraction to her. She looked Matty squarely in the face and said, “He’s not Gabe.”
Matty narrowed his eyes then quoted, in his oratorical voice, “A wounded deer leaps highest.”
Bianca mocked a gasp, though truly, she was glad her brother had dished out his own poetic. They could put their drama skills to good use, communicating with each other at their most familiar level. And he knew she knew her Emily. “Yes, dear brother, but Ms. Dickinson has more to say on the subject, doesn’t she? ‘. . . If I can stop one heart from breaking, / I shall not live in vain.’ ”
“Whose heart would you be helping, hun?” Handro asked, looking up from his wine glass, his slender hand resting on his slim-cut jeans.
“My own,” she said, her voice clearer than it had been in months; she felt it.
And to this, even Matty raised his glass.
Joshua and his nephew, Jayden, did all right by each other, two strays in this fool world. But Bianca, she was a light. She’d stayed after class with him again, making their conversations in the coffee shop a regular ritual. She said something smart, which he would come to see was her norm. “Think about it. Remedios Varo, Leonora Carrington, Frida Kahlo. Mexico’s three most prominent surrealist painters, all women. But they almost never come up when people refer to the surrealists. Why do you think that is?” She said the last part all sassy, like it wasn’t a question.
He played devil’s advocate. “You consider Frida a surrealist?”
She scrunched up her face, took a sip of her coffee. Man, she was cute. “It depends on what you mean by surrealism,” she answered. “The images are almost always recognizable. They’re taken from a reality we accept. But their context forces us to rethink their purpose. Think about it: If a teacup is covered in fur, I still see the teacup, though I don’t know what to do with it or how it got that way. Did it get cold? Did it become mammalian? If a teacup can become like a mammal, can a mammal become like porcelain? And could this be the teacup’s answer to all those metaphoric descriptions of women’s porcelain skin? The images are recognizable. It’s the placement. One or two steps to the side of their reality, that brings surrealism to life. All Kafka has to do is make Gregor Samsa a cockroach, and nothing else need change in the story. Same house, same family, same concerns.”
“So, like, The Two Fridas. Or the Frida head on a deer. That’s surrealism.”
“Exactly. Frida said people thought she was a surrealist, painting nightmares. Yet she painted her own reality. So I’m saying reality is surreal. Know what I mean?”
He knew a little something about nightmare realities. He stared at her, the corners of his mouth flicking, like he wanted to laugh but he wasn’t sure about what. Like he wanted to kiss this gorgeous, intelligent woman if she’d let him. He sensed hers was as old a soul as his. He must’ve been staring too long by the way she looked at him with eyebrows raised, her eyes slightly laughing back at him, like he’d missed a move in a chess match. He’d gladly be captured by this queen. He cleared his throat. “And you. You’re a writer? You mentioned Kafka.”
Her cheeks and ears reddened. “I write. I don’t know if I’d call myself a writer.”
“If you write, then you’re a writer.”
She smiled. “I have this dream that one day I’ll write something important. Something true. Not true as it happened in reality, deeper than that. Something so true, it could never be real in this world. Not here. I don’t know.” She shrugged, and when she lifted her eyes to his, Joshua detected apprehension. She looked scared, almost. “I sound crazy, right?” she said, laughing. “Babbling about teacups and dreams.”
“Hold fast to dreams / For if dreams die / Life is a broken-winged bird / That cannot fly,” he recited, his cheeks flushed. “Langston Hughes wrote that. My favorite poet.”