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  We were quiet. Mama snipped awhile. “You’re pretty,” she said suddenly. “Mercedes, you’re a very pretty lady.”

  “Mmmm,” she said, her eyes still closed. “That’s a lie. I mean, it’s not like I ever wanted to be. I knew I was no good at it. I could look at Edith and see there was no point even thinking about it. I always wanted to be good at something, the best, so good that other people’d despair at even trying. But there never was anything.”

  “Very pretty,” said my mother. “Beautiful hair, and color—”

  “It doesn’t matter, anyhow,” I said.

  Mercedes sat at attention and pointed at me. Her hair pulled out of my mother’s fingers. “Bingo,” she said. “That’s it exactly.” She stood up. “Enough. You’re finished, aren’t you?”

  “I thought we were going to set it,” said my mother.

  “That’s silly. A waste of time.” Mercedes slipped off the towel that was around her neck and put it on the table. She looked embarrassed. “I’m going to rest.”

  “Well,” said Mama. “I guess you’re next, Ruthie.”

  “Can’t we do it tomorrow? I have homework.”

  “Is it math? Mercedes can help you.”

  “No I can’t,” said Mercedes. “I haven’t got a head for figures.” She left the room, trailing smoke.

  “Imagine,” said my mother, after a moment. “Do you think that’s it? Do you think that’s what’s done it? She’s a genius, a genius, and all those years, just wanting to be pretty. She was famous, she was in the papers. Her future was so bright—”

  “I don’t think that’s it,” I said, but what I thought was: answers don’t come that easy.

  I woke up in the middle of the night, not knowing what time it was. Mercedes still had my radio. I walked to the kitchen to look at the clock and maybe get something to eat.

  When I got there, Mercedes was at the table, reading my report where I had left it.

  “Hey,” I said crossly. I was sleepy and feeling fussy.

  “Oh—” She dropped it. “I was just reading—”

  “Well, don’t. I don’t need someone going through, correcting my spelling.”

  “I wasn’t, I wouldn’t.” She stuttered, panicked. “I was only interested. I don’t know anything about the Boston Tea Party.”

  I took the report off the table and crunched it up angrily. “I know I’m not smart. I don’t need someone pointing it out. We all know you’re a genius, Mercedes.”

  She looked terrified, as if I was going to hit her or make her speak French. “I’m not,” she said. “I’m not at all smart. Please don’t think I am.”

  “I don’t know who you think you’re fooling. I think it’s mean pretending you’re stupid when you’re not. It’s like pretending you’re blind or crippled just to get out of stuff.”

  “Ruthie, Ruthie,” she said. “You’re smarter than you know.”

  “Mmmm,” I said, doing a dead-on, cruel impression. “That’s a lie.”

  We looked at each other. I shook my head and said, just like my mother did sometimes, “You know, I simply don’t understand you.” It was true. I’m sure she heard it in my voice.

  “Oh yes,” she said. “That much I do know.”

  That night I cried in bed, replaying the scene. I was furious with myself, and furious with my mother, and furious with Mercedes. But I knew which one of us was guiltiest, and pinched my thighs and slapped my stomach, rolling in the sheets.

  Mercedes disappeared before we got up. Mama was frantic—she took the day off work and drove around the city.

  “Did she say anything to you?” she asked me. “Did she give you any hints?”

  “No,” I said, miserable. “Nothing.”

  I found a gift from Mercedes on my desk. It was my report, typed neatly, all the spelling and historical mistakes corrected, but without too much ambition. She had read and memorized it all at once—Mama said that she had a photographic memory. Mercedes knew that I wouldn’t be too proud to take it if she snuck it in. I was grateful, I admit. I had ruined my only clean copy of it.

  She left my mother a copy of The Rose in the Garden, with the word Love written on the title page. She didn’t get around to signing her name. All there was was that one word.

  We never heard from her again. Mama scouted the libraries, the grocery stores, the boardinghouses. She took out classified ads in the newspapers, hoping that someone would find her and call us. Whenever we were in the car, looking down driveways and in doorways, if we spotted a small silhouette or a wisp of smoke, my mother slowed down. “That her?” she asked. I always was the one to decide it wasn’t. At Christmas time, when she figured that Mercedes would be loneliest, Mama stuck up signs all over downtown that said, “Mercedes, We Miss You. Come Back For X-Mas. Love, Ellen and Ruthie.” Nothing in return.

  I turned in that report she wrote for me and got an F. The note at the bottom said: “You know you weren’t supposed to get help.”

  What We Know About the Lost Aztec Children

  The old man opened our front door just wide enough to stick his head in and peer around like a bashful jack-in-the-box. Then he rested his chin on the doorknob. He was so short he barely had to bend over.

  “Hello?” I said.

  “Here’s to you, boy,” he answered, staring at me evenly. The pale gray color of his eyes seemed stingily applied, though his white hair was generous and pumped full of air over his oddly shaped head.

  I didn’t know what to make of him, and it looked like the feeling was mutual. He was clearly sizing me up: muddy sneakers, clean otherwise, teen-aged. No danger at all. He finished opening the door and walked in; my mother followed and kicked the door closed behind her.

  “Steven,” she said to me. “This is your Uncle Plazo.”

  The rest of him was as odd as his head: a tiny old man dressed in a bright serape, navy pants, and shabby loafers. He was four feet tall, if that, proportioned like a child, but skinny as a parking meter. He gripped an unlit pipe in his teeth.

  I held my hand out. “Nice to meet you,” I said.

  The man took the pipe from his mouth, and with the same hand took mine, so that we both clasped the bowl. He shook my whole arm. “Fucking A,” he answered. “Absolutely, absolutely.” His voice was excited and boyish.

  I laughed; Ma shot me a look.

  “We don’t use that sort of language, Plazo,” she told the man. Then she asked me, “Where are Helen and Carol?”

  “Upstairs,” I said.

  My mother started up the stairs, my unknown Uncle Plazo holding on to a fold of her full skirt. When he and Ma came back down seconds later, my sisters trailed afterward. Ma and Uncle Plazo went into the kitchen; Carol and Helen stood in the doorway, gawking a minute, then came to talk to me.

  “Who is he?” asked Carol.

  “No idea.”

  “He’s our uncle?” Helen asked.

  “I don’t think so,” I said. “I mean, he could be a great-uncle, but wouldn’t we have heard of him?”

  “He could be from Tennessee,” said Carol. Ma was originally from Nashville, and we always considered it a very exotic place.

  “He doesn’t have an accent,” I said. “It’s just an expression, you know, calling an old guy an uncle.”

  “But didn’t you notice?” said Helen.

  “Notice what?”

  Helen looked carefully at Carol, who at eleven was our youngest, three years younger than me and two younger than Helen. “Well—” Helen said.

  “Maybe he’s just senile,” I said. “He’s old.”

  Helen shook her head. “Betty Snow has a brother like that,” she said. “You can tell.”

  From the kitchen we heard Ma say, “Plazo, could you bring me the bag of rice from the cupboard?”

  Apparently, Ma’s warning about language impressed the man, because he said now, in stentorian tones, “It would be my greatest pleasure.”

  We walked to the door of the kitchen. Uncle Plazo was talk
ing about snakes and why he liked them. My mother was just closing the fridge with her foot. She turned to look at us, while Plazo kept on talking.

  “We were just wondering—” I said.

  “Plazo,” Ma said, “is a friend from the circus.”

  My mother had been a circus performer in the early thirties, years before I was born. This much I knew: she did not walk the high wire or dance in the lion’s cage or work under the big top at all. She did not perform in spangles or feathers or a low-cut dress, though sometimes when I was younger I’d imagined her that way. My mother’s act consisted of cutting silhouettes, smoking a cigarette, signing her name, loading and firing a gun. What transformed these simple acts into miracles was that my mother, the Armless Wonder, did them all with her feet.

  Some ignorant people say, What a shame, your mother couldn’t hold you when you were a baby. But of course she did hold me, the same way she did everything: with her strong legs. I can’t remember ever even thinking about it. She nursed me, too, steadying my head in the curve of her sole. Perhaps she tickled my ears with her toes. A baby is not as complicated as a gun, and more forgiving. Ma had me figured out pretty quickly, and my sisters Carol and Helen soon after. When I asked my father about the circus, he’d just shrug. He was a doctor, and dispensed advice, not information. My mother almost never spoke of her circus career.

  I did not dream about my mother’s life in the circus. I was not a dreamer—I just made certain assumptions, had pictured her with exotic men in black suits or canary-yellow leotards. It didn’t occur to me that my mother had spent her time in the Ten-in-One, the sideshow, and that meant a different sort of company.

  At dinnertime, my father held Uncle Plazo’s chair for him, like a suitor. Plazo climbed into it elaborately, first hands, then knees, finally turning to sit down, though he wasn’t so short he’d have to do it that way. My father had not prepared for this approach, and Plazo was still two feet from the table. Dad slid the chair and Plazo in with ease.

  Uncle Plazo sat next to me. My mother had given him some of my old clothing to wear—a pair of blue jeans and a plaid flannel shirt—and he made them look small and precious. His silver hair stuck straight up in back.

  “We used to be the Lost Aztec Children,” he said to me.

  I smiled at him, unsure of how to answer.

  “That’s right,” he said. “See the amazing Lost Children of Ancient Me-hico, see the Lost Aztec Children, they’re amazing, they’re the Lost Children, Plazo and Zleeno. They’re not like you and me, they’re from—”

  “Plazo worked right next to me in the circus,” said Ma.

  “That’s right,” said Plazo. He pushed his food around the plate.

  My father sat at the head of the table. Now he did not even seem to notice Uncle Plazo; it was as if this strange small man was just one of the children’s friends, brought home for a meal.

  Carol lifted up the serving plate. “Would you like some more chicken, Uncle Plazo?”

  “Sure thing,” he said. “I love chicken. I eat it whenever I get a chance. Chicken’s my favorite.”

  “Plazo,” said Ma. “You still have some chicken on your plate.”

  “That’s because it’s good,” he said. “You can never have too much chicken.”

  “Why don’t you finish what’s on your plate, and then if you still want it, you can have some more.”

  “We won’t let you go hungry,” said my father.

  “I’m never hungry,” said Uncle Plazo. He picked up a carrot and weighed it in his palm. “I used to be hungry all the time, but now I’m not, not since all that trouble.” He looked at me. “My brother died on me, I don’t know why.”

  “That’s too bad,” I said.

  “It is too bad, it really is. Died on me two hundred seventy-three days ago. He died of old age, that’s what they told me, but he was younger than me, he was one year and thirty days younger. I miss him.”

  “Of course you do,” said Ma. Uncle Plazo was looking at his plate; his mouth looked worried that it’d run out of things to say.

  “It’s sad to lose a brother,” Dad said.

  “Corrine knew my brother,” said Uncle Plazo. “You knew my brother, right, Corrine? We were the Lost Aztec Children.”

  “Where are you from?” I asked.

  “From the jungles of Aztec,” he said. “From the jungles of ancient Me-hico.”

  “You don’t look Mexican,” I said.

  “I’m not,” said Uncle Plazo.

  “Where were you born?” asked Carol.

  “Who cares?” he said. “Waltham, Massachusetts.” He pushed his plate away and began to fill his pipe. “I was born there, but I’m not from there. I’m from the jungle, I’m the missing link.”

  “What did you do in the circus?” I asked.

  “I was the Lost Aztec Children.”

  “But did you do an act?” I asked. “Did you sing or lift things?”

  He was quiet for a minute, thinking. “I didn’t talk,” he said finally. “They paid me a nickel a day not to talk.”

  That night, in his den, my father told us Uncle Plazo’s story. Plazo’s real name was Hiram, but he’d been called Plazo so long it was all he answered to. He’d grown up in the circus with his brother, had traveled for sixty years before the two of them retired to Boston, to a tiny one-room apartment. But the brother died, and either he’d been the one in charge or the two of them had managed—just managed—together. The neighbors found Plazo hiding in one bed, his brother dead in the other. He’d given the neighbors our number.

  “I don’t understand,” I said. “People paid money to see two little retarded men?”

  My father pulled at his ear and didn’t look at me. “People will pay to see anything,” he said, “if somebody tells them it’s worth the money. Now he’s a guest. Steven,” he said. “I want you to watch out for him.”

  “Why me?” I complained. I had my own things to do; I didn’t want to hang around the Lost Aztec Child.

  “You’re older,” he said, “and I just think he’d be more comfortable around you. I’m asking you a favor, all right?”

  “Okay,” I said.

  My father must have known that Uncle Plazo would be frightened of Helen and Carol—called them only “those girls”—and the feeling was mutual. “He’s creepy,” said Carol. “His eyes are spooky.” But he took to me. When I came home from school the day after his arrival, he was waiting by the front door.

  “Stevie boy, Stevie,” he said.

  He had a pile of pictures in his lap. Some of them were quite old, probably acquired when he first started traveling. They just looked like ordinary old photographs, the sort that any member of late nineteenth-century society might pose for: the backgrounds were painted; there was usually one piece of elegant furniture. A bearded lady stood behind her seated husband, their young son leaning on the arm of the chair. The Skeleton Dude, in tight ribbed pants, a tailcoat, a monocle, conferred with his manservant. An albino with hair that stood in a halo around his head was captioned The Ambassador from Mars. An armless woman—not my mother—held a pen between her toes.

  “This one’s us,” Uncle Plazo said, handing me a cardboard-backed photo. In it, two little men who looked identical stood on either side of a much taller, bearded man. I couldn’t tell which one was Plazo; they certainly did look like odd children. Both were dressed in tunics decorated with cut-out suns; both held their hands in front of them, as if they were about to sing. Their hair was long and straight, and they sported goatees. The man in the center looked like a biblical prophet or a school principal, I couldn’t decide which.

  “Who’s the guy in the middle?” I asked.

  “He’s dead,” said Uncle Plazo. “He’s long dead and he’s good riddance. I don’t care about him a bit. See, this is Zleeno”—he pointed to the Aztec Child on the left,—“and this is me. This is a long time ago, Stevie boy, before you were born.”

  I studied the photo awhile, to make it see
m like I was interested in it. Pasted to the back was a little pamphlet, titled, “What We Know About Plazo and Zleeno, the Lost Aztec Children.” The pages were crumpling at the edges. A woodcut decorated the front: Plazo and Zleeno in the wild, with several men in suits trying to catch them with nets.

  “Our true history,” said Uncle Plazo.

  I opened the booklet and read, “Scientific men who have studied the Lost Aztec Children believe they are neither idiots, nor lusus naturae, but the solitary remaining members of a now forgotten race. Undersized and ferocious, they hold no intercourse with the civilized tribes, and can kill a tiger with their bare hands.”

  I looked at Uncle Plazo. He blinked rapidly and smiled.

  I flipped through the rest of the pile. After a while the formal photographs turned to postcards, some with several poses of the performer and banner captions across them. The Seal Boy, with flippers instead of arms and legs; the Tattooed Beauty; a pair of angry Siamese twins. I began to feel relieved that we had ended up with only this fast-talking old man.

  Finally, I hit one of Ma. She held a cigarette between her toes, elegantly, like a movie star. Her clothing was conservative and pretty, free of the glitz I’d always imagined: she wore just a full skirt and a blouse, a few silk flowers at the throat. Her makeup had been glamorously applied, and though I knew from the date on the back that she was only sixteen, I couldn’t believe it. I had never seen a picture of my mother before her marriage; I had never even seen a picture of her without my father. We had plenty of the two of them, and in these photographs Dad was always touching Ma: an arm around her waist, a hand on the back of her neck. In their wedding photo, he stood behind her, both arms around her as if his limbs were just another asset that they now shared.