Living Up The Street

While Soto’s wife works, he stays at home attempting to write poetry: “What was there to do in summer? After seeing my wife off to work at 7:00 in the morning, I climbed back into bed and fell asleep with our cat Benny, who was equally oblivious to the fact that most people were off to their tasks of making money” (144). Although he is the “author of a prize-winning collection of poems, with another on the way” (145), he is worried because he feels like his current attempts at writing aren’t good.

Soto and Carolyn live “in a complex of seven identical cottages which, if in another part of town, might have been considered charming and even historically interesting. But [their] complex sat between busy streets in an area of loud service vehicles” (145). Right next door is a bar, and drunkards frequently roam the residential streets.

The couple tries to think of ways to make extra money. Carolyn is an artist by training, and they contemplate using her skills to paint signs for businesses; that dream quickly fades because neither of them has the gumption to sell her skills. Instead, Carolyn gets a lucrative job at Fresno State: “I was left to my own devices: reading Yourcenar’s Hadrian’s Memoirs and writing poems that I crushed into balls and hurled at our cat Benny” (149). He says, “When it was obvious that, for whatever reason, the poems I had been writing were bad, I began to consider finding a real job” (149). He and his old graduate school roommate go to a telephone company down the road to apply for a job.

Soto’s first book comes out, and Carolyn throws him a book-selling party. Their families, friends, and mentors attend, and he thinks the “party was a success” because he “sold twenty-two books and received many handshakes and loud cheers” (155). 

This story is addressed to Carolyn and consists of Soto telling her what he’s doing and thinking. It’s never made clear why Carolyn isn’t with Soto anymore, but it’s evident that she’s gone when he writes this story and that he misses her.

He opens by telling Carolyn about drinking with Ernesto and Dianne the night before: “Banjo went from one to another licking us. Poor dog, all day he was locked in the third bathroom because Ernesto had relatives over and, as you know, he has that nasty habit of pissing on the feet of strangers” (156). Banjo was he and Carolyn’s dog.

That morning, he “woke very slowly with a book, had eggs and coffee, and went to work with Ernesto who wanted [him] to help translate some speeches of Portillo—speeches that he’s going to give at the United Nations” (157). Afterward, Ernesto makes him go to the doctor because he’s had a sore throat, and the doctor gives him a shot of penicillin.

Soto continues addressing Carolyn: “The day before you left, while you were out shopping for lacquerware at the national museum, I carried Mariko the five blocks to Chapultepec Park, past that pudgy policeman who usually whispers, ‘Here he comes, that young Mexican with his Chinese baby.’” (158). Mariko is he and Carolyn’s daughter. After the park he takes a taxi home: “[B]ut instead of going inside I carried her around the block, bouncing her quietly in my arms as I told her how I was going to miss her, how I loved her” (159).

He says that he had beers with Carmen, a woman he practices Spanish with, and afterward, the police pulled them over. The officers harass him and ultimately steal his “pesos and credit cards and even [his] library card—anything that looked like money” (162). Soto discloses his fear and how the event affected him: “I was scared because I thought they were going to shoot me. A routine bang in the head. I was shaking and thinking of you and Mariko, forever gone, as I waited for something to happen” (163). Instead, the police kick Soto out of their car, and he goes home.

Soto reflects about a particularly good day between him and Carolyn:

Once, when we were bored and irritable in our apartment in Mexico City, the four of us—Ernesto, Dianne, Carolyn, and I—got into the Renault we had bought the previous week and risked the rough and sometimes unfair roads that wound to Cuernavaca. We were happy in the car when we left and happier when we drove into town and discovered a fuchsia-like vine with red-flamed flowers(164).

They all have lunch and drink beers, buy souvenirs, and visit museums. After shopping, they “drove outside the city in search of a nursery, to make [their] apartment more lush since it was uncomfortably bare: A dining table with chairs, an empty bird cage, two mattresses, and an ironing board that doubled as a writing table” (165).

On the way back to the car to head home, they come upon a blind harp player. Ernesto approaches him, and the harp player tells him the story of how he came to play the harp. He says that a group of Indians found the “wooden harp, stringless and warped, on a river bank” (165), but none of them knew what it was. They brought it to town to sell, and the man, who wasn’t blind at the time, immediately recognized it and traded a frying pan and pocket knife to get it. The blind man then plays for them, and when they try to tip him for the beautiful song, the man says declines their offer and says, “It’s nothing, young man. Be a Mexican and go on” (167).