Sabrina & Corina: Stories

Neva, the story’s narrator, states that she grew up in Saguarita, Colorado. She shared an adobe home with her grandmother and mother—no men. She describes her grandmother as “a small shadowy woman […] [who] kept an herb garden in the backyard, hung her laundry on metal cords, and occasionally snapped the necks of chickens with an elegant flick of the wrist” (163). Her grandmother would often proclaim, “I’m too damn old to still be raising children” (163)—and she was never referring to Neva, but to Neva’s mother, Desiree Leticia Cordova.

Desiree is unstable, and has struggled with substance abuse her whole life. During her twenties, she worked as a dancer at a strip club. Neva writes, “In her thirties, the small portion of them she got to live, she uprooted us to California during one of her ecstatic breaks from perpetual sadness. These breaks were infrequent but potent and gave my mother the strength of ten women who require no sleep and live for their whims” (164).

When Neva was 12, her mother abruptly announced that she was beginning plans to get herself and Neva out of their “dump” of a town and move them to “San Diego, with all that sunshine” (164). Two months later, they embarked on their journey: “My mother convinced a white-haired cowboy who worked in oil and gas to give her a couple thousand dollars,” Neva explains (164). Although Neva’s grandmother chided that the man would be expecting something in return for the money, Desiree took the money and moved to San Diego with Neva.

Desiree and Neva moved to a street named Eula Court in San Diego. The street was full of “rainbow-colored houses,” and they lived in the carriage house behind a “boxy home, sunshine yellow with white trim” (165). On their first day there, the landlord, Casey, showed them around. He lived in the front house: “I like him […] Seems dependable,” Desiree remarked (166).

Neva remembers that the carriage house in San Diego was nothing like the home they had left in Saguarita: “My bedroom was a tiny eggshell space, while my mother’s was large and airy with her queen-size bed dead center beneath the ceiling fan” (166). Desiree arrayed her perfumes, cheap jewelry, and lacy secondhand dresses in her room, prompting her mother, over the phone, to declare their new living situation “a phony paradise” (166).

Money soon ran thin. Because her mother was no longer there to look after Neva in the evenings, dancing was not an option for Desiree. She began a daily habit of furiously circling classified job ads in the paper. When Neva suggested that she enroll in school to become a dental assistant or massage therapist, she told her that there was no money for school, and that she wasn’t suited to being a student anyway.

During November, Neva turned 13. The morning of her birthday, Desiree handed her an empty box with a note inside of it that read: “Once I get a job, this will be whatever you want” (167). They then went to the grocery store, where Desiree encouraged Neva to pick out whatever she wanted, despite Neva’s protestations that they could not afford much. Desiree ultimately crammed many sweets into her purse, and only paid for a few items.

By chance, Corey was in line in the checkout behind them. He then joined them for Neva’s birthday picnic in Balboa Park: “If Casey knew we didn’t pay, he said nothing,” Neva remembers (169). She continues: “I blew out a stolen candle stuffed into a stolen cupcake and worried the entire time that strangers might mistake us for a family” (169).

Casey had no real employment, and was not even handy around the property. To make a living, he simply collected rent on properties that his parents gave to him. After the picnic, he began flirting with Desiree in earnest, “and by November there was no rent to pay at all,” Neva recounts (169).

Neva was mostly a loner at her new school, which was also filled with teachers who didn’t bother to learn her name. She would regularly talk to her grandmother on the phone during her time in San Diego, and her grandmother frequently asked if Desiree had found employment. Neva initially didn’t tell her that Desiree was spending her days doing nothing much but hanging out with Casey.

One day, Desiree convinced Neva to go with her and Casey to Mission Beach. There, Casey bought Neva a funnel cake and gave her quarters with which to operate the arcade games. They flew a kite which quickly fell from the sky and was abandoned. Neva quietly observed her mother and Casey’s rhythm and affections.

On the Sunday following the beach trip, Desiree’s mood dipped into lethargy and melancholy. She told Neva, “Everything stays the same […] Nothing changes. It makes me feel like I’m dead” (171). Neva assured her mother that she was simply in a sad mood, and then asked her to tell her a story.

Desiree told Neva the story of Neva’s birth. She pointed out the cesarean scar and says, “Here. This is where you came from. You cried and cried. The doctors said you cried so much you’d never need to cry again. They were right. You never cry, Neva. You’re always tough” (172).

Then, Desiree asked Neva to tell her a story in return. Neva was stumped, as she felt that all the stories she had to tell were not her own, but her mother’s. She decided to tell her mother that the palm trees in San Diego are not actually native to California—a fact that Desiree did not previously know.

Neva eventually told her grandmother about Casey. Her grandmother demanded their return to Colorado as a result, and Desiree stopped taking her mother’s calls: “Though she didn’t have the money for a flight and she was too old to drive any further west, my grandmother made sure we felt her presence” (172).

That year, Casey concocted a plan to take Desiree and Neva to a beachfront motel in Solana beach for Christmas. Desiree painstakingly packed for the trip, while asking Neva for feedback about which clothes and swimsuits are most flattering on her. Desiree also gave Neva a spontaneous gift: “a charm bracelet with only three charms. A baby rattle, a chicken, a locket” (175). She told Neva that, one night when Neva was a baby, she came down with a serious and potentially-fatal fever. Desiree cut off some of her hair at the time, terming it “fever hair.” She then enclosed the hair, along with some of her own, in the charm that dangled from the bracelet.

On the night that Casey, Desiree, and Neva were set to depart for their drip, Casey was nowhere to be found. Desiree flew into a rage. She pounded on the windows of Casey’s windows and slung mud onto his front door. Then, she began to weep, and asked Neva to take a nap with her. After their nap, Desiree said, “I think we’re done here, Neva. I think it’s best we go home” (177).

Casey came home at four o’clock in the morning. He told an incensed Desiree “something about a flat tire, a friend’s flat tire, difficult properties down on the border” (177). When Desiree came back into the carriage house, she assured Neva that she was no longer upset.

The next day, Christmas morning, Neva dreamt of snow. She reflected on the fact that this Christmas was nothing like what it would have been like in Saguarita, where she would have opened a stocking full of practical, but not particularly fun, presents. She noticed that a fog had rolled in, and found her mother packing the car: “Where are we going? […] Home?” she asked (178): “We’re going to the beach with Casey. Remember?” Desiree replied (178). Neva then watched her mother and Casey exchange an intimate kiss against the car. Her mother’s hat sailed off of her head then, exposing her wide forehead. When Neva returned the hat to her mother and grazed her skin, she remembers her skin feeling peculiarly cold and death-like. She remembers thinking that her mother looked like someone who “had given someone else permission to wear her skin” (179). She also realized that “Soon the world would yank [her mother’s] chain of sadness against every shore, every rock, every glass-filled beach, leaving nothing but the broken hull of a drowned woman” (179). Neva turned away from her mother then, repeatedly whispering “No.” The story ends with an image of Desiree shrilly yelling for Neva to return to her.