by Roger Bruner
“Adelante.”
Nikki opened the door tentatively and walked in with a meal on a tray. I had never seen so much food on one plate. Not that I had ever experienced the luxury of eating from a plate. Could all of this be for me?
I scooted up in bed as she placed the tray as close to my lap as she could fit it and sat down on a nearby straight chair. Perhaps the way I devoured my first American meal softened her heart a bit. As she observed me—trying hard not to stare—she began to weep.
I barely noticed her tears at first. I was too busy eating. Only by the time I swallowed the last bite did I realize she had been sobbing for a number of minutes.
She set the tray on top of a nearby chest of drawers, drawers that would remain empty tonight. She seemed hesitant about what to do next. She apparently didn’t want to leave me alone, yet must have realized we wouldn’t be able to talk if she stayed. The awareness that the two of us could never converse in either her heart language or mine angered and frustrated me.
To my surprise, she pushed the chair away and sat down on the edge of my bed. I smiled and wiggled several inches closer to the opposite side to give her more room.
She stared at my oversized belly. Why did she find it so fascinating? Surely I wasn’t the first pregnant woman she’d seen.
Ah? I was probably the first woman her boyfriend had gotten pregnant. Boyfriends and girlfriends probably didn’t sleep with other people if they were truly in love. Not even in America. If Tomás’s unfaithfulness upset her, however, I couldn’t see it in her expression.
Then it struck me…
Perhaps she was more jealous than I’d realized. I meant nothing to Tomás, yet I was having his baby. She would have given anything to be in my place…pregnant with her boyfriend’s baby. Either he wouldn’t allow her to get pregnant or she hadn’t been able to.
Those things happened in Mexico. I assumed they could happen in America, too.
I was curious about something. I didn’t know the American way of doing things. Marriage must not have been a prerequisite for intimacy or having babies here. And only sometimes was pregnancy a prerequisite for marriage. Having a baby out of wedlock in Tomás’s world would not result in the kind of stigma it had in Santa María.
Nikki looked at my belly again and then into my eyes. As if asking, May I?
I smiled slightly and nodded. Señora Valdes was the only other person to touch me. She had not asked permission first.
Nikki placed one soft hand on my stomach and then the other. She didn’t mean to tickle me, I am sure, but I couldn’t keep from laughing. That made the baby kick Nikki’s left hand, and she laughed aloud. She had probably never been this close to a pregnant woman before. Although her tears continued to fall, the smile on her face radiated fascination and joy.
No matter how much I wished she was pregnant rather than me, nothing would change the facts. And what plan had Tomás cooked up and presented to Nikki as the next best thing to her being pregnant?
The plan that would make her accept my presence here. As an unavoidable part of Tomás’s life.
~*~
The next morning Tomás entered my room without knocking. Although I smelled food cooking, he came empty-handed. That didn’t surprise me. He wouldn’t do anything he could make Nikki do.
“Yes?” I said, trying to avoid revealing my negative feelings about his treatment of both Nikki and me.
“I…Nikki and I have made a decision.” His initial timidity quickly changed to temerity. “She wants a baby. One I have fathered. You don’t need or deserve one. You shouldn’t have one, especially this one. When this baby—this little girl—is born, Nikki will adopt it.”
I stared at him. “What is adopt?”
After explaining, he went on to say, “Things are different here. Nikki can have a baby and remain unmarried and no one will say bad things about her. On the other hand, it is a stigma for you. This way, we remove the stigma—at least in the villagers’ eyes—by giving the baby to Nikki.”
What are you saying? What mother doesn’t want to keep her baby regardless of stigma? And what kind of woman would take a baby away from her birth mother?
What a disturbing place this America was if people considered that practice to be normal and desirable.
“This way, you and I won’t have to get married,” he said. “Neither of us really wants to.”
“But how will…?
“Oh, the three of us will live together, and you will earn your keep by serving as the baby’s niñera. Her babysitter. We will give the villagers their happy pictures, and they will be none the wiser.”
So this was what Tomás and Nikki had been plotting the previous afternoon. They didn’t seem to realize their plan had several major flaws. Like the proof of marriage the villagers expected to see.
More serious still, however, they weren’t taking my feelings into consideration. Was this why she had shown such an interest in my baby? Because she knew it would soon be hers?
That couldn’t have been entirely true. She had acted as interested in me as in the baby.
Perhaps she wants to adopt me, too? I would have to ask Tomás.
I couldn’t allow myself to harbor bitter thoughts against Nikki. Tomás the schemer had undoubtedly come up with this idea just to worm his way out of the trouble he’d gotten into with Nikki by bringing me here. I couldn’t imagine that she had suggested the idea; she probably didn’t realize he hadn’t discussed it with me first.
Tomás didn’t love me and I had nothing to lose. I would use my secret weapon.
“Ah, but Tomás, what will happen when the police come and arrest you for smuggling illegal drugs across the border from Mexico and selling them in the United States? From what I hear, you would spend many years in prison, and a ‘pretty boy’ like you would be very popular with the other men in an American prison.”
I might have begun by shooting bullets in the dark, but by the time I finished repeating everything Señora Valdes had told me—not to mention what I’d watched him do to the blue convertible—I’d hit the bullseye. I couldn’t keep from grinning as the color drained from his face. Was he going to pass out on the floor of my bedroom?
Although fainting would have been a just, preliminary punishment for Tomás, I jumped out of bed—as fast as a pregnant woman can rise from horizontal to vertical, anyhow—and guided him to the same chair Nikki had sat in the night before while I ate. He collapsed there clumsily and made quite a racket trying to keep from sliding off.
Clatter from the kitchen—that room looked very much like the magazine pictures I’d wondered about—quieted down as if Nikki were trying to hear what was going on. Unfortunately for her, we hadn’t been speaking her language.
“Tomás?” she yelled. Worry sounds the same in any language.
“I’m bien…I’m okay,” he responded. Although his voice sounded better than it had after his beating two days earlier, it was shaky and unconvincing.
“You won’t continue to be bien.” I pointed my finger at him. “Not if I turn you in to the authorities. I can put you away for several lifetimes.” Señora Valdes had taught me better than she could possibly have realized.
He narrowed his eyes. “You wouldn’t do that, would you? You love me, or so you said.” He sounded so pathetic an ordinary woman might have felt sorry for him.
I almost laughed. “Do not speak to me of love. You don’t know the meaning of the word.”
“I…” He looked at the window as if it might provide a means of escape.
Watching him squirm didn’t give me any pleasure. I needed to finish. “If you marry me and let me keep my baby girl, I will not turn you in. And no one can make me say anything against you. The decision is yours.”
“I…” His dark eyes darted back and forth as if the wheels in his mind were whirring at top speed. “Yes, that would protect me. Nikki will understand. She loves me. She will accept your solution as the only way to keep you from betraying me.”
“Tomás,”—I spoke in such a controlled and mature tone that I surprised myself—“you may be able to get a woman pregnant, but you do not know the first thing about how we think or feel. Nikki will not accept this plan—not without protest.”
He shook visibly and didn’t speak again for several moments. “Nikki is a grown woman…” Although he sounded like he was trying to convince himself, his lack of confidence trembled fiercely beneath his bravado. “She’ll understand. I will make her understand. I’ll talk with her now. You will see. She will cooperate.”
After he closed the door behind him, I spoke in a near-whisper. “You will be the one who sees.”
Peace reigned in the kitchen for several minutes. Then war broke out. Nikki yelled and began throwing various objects that broke against the wall. Tomás swore first in Spanish and then in English. I was thankful I didn’t know what he was saying. A moment later, a heavy object—perhaps a table—crashed to the floor.
I felt sorry for whoever lived directly beneath Tomás.
A short time later, the front door slammed so hard it vibrated objects all the way back to my room. Several items fell and broke on the floor.
Tomás walked down the hallway and opened the door to my bedroom again.
“If we are to marry soon…to be husband and wife,”—meekness had replaced his earlier overconfidence—“would you clean…?” I gave him the coldest stare I could. “Would you help me clean up the kitchen? It’s a mess. The breakfast Nikki was cooking is everywhere.”
“Tomás, we will be husband and wife in name only. I will help you this one time. You must clean up your own messes in the future—no matter what kind they are. And you will never enter my bedroom again without knocking first and waiting to be invited in. Do you understand?”
He shrugged.
6
After Tomás and I finished cleaning up the kitchen, he turned to me. “Rosa, it is past time for breakfast. Would you fix us something to eat?”
What? No “thank you” for helping you?
As self-centered as Tomás was, including me in his breakfast request had been a shock. I needed to teach him a lesson. I would fix a breakfast he might not live to thank me for. Or at least keep him from asking me to cook for him again.
He had assumed I knew how to cook. I didn’t.
What little I knew about food preparation I had learned from watching the village women—at a distance. While my observations had given me some ideas about what to do, I had never had the opportunity—not once—to practice even the most menial of cooking tasks. My keepers didn’t trust me—I laughed to myself at the thought—even to boil water.
Since I had no idea what to fix or how to fix it, I literally threw something together. Eggs (complete with the shells), flour, cheese, tomato juice, jalapeño peppers, chili peppers, and the biggest onion I had ever seen in my life. One that smelled spoiled. My concoction didn’t simply look unappetizing. It looked nauseating.
And it smelled even worse.
Tomás and I sat across the kitchen table from one another. I refused to sit closer to him.
“I will not cook for you again,” I stated firmly as he picked up his fork. “You must either fix your own meals or eat food like fruit that doesn’t need cooking. You may go elsewhere to eat if you prefer. That is a popular thing to do in America, yes?”
He grumbled. I hadn’t expected that much of a response.
Perhaps you should get in touch with Nikki, beg for forgiveness, and implore her to come back. Both of us need her.
Despite her desire to adopt my baby girl, Nikki was an easy woman to like. Regardless of the language barrier, she was good company, and she differed from Tomás as much as she differed from the villagers of Santa María.
Although liking and trusting were two different things, I decided to take a chance. Maybe because she was a woman. Maybe because we couldn’t make demands of one another…or any promises.
Or mostly because we seemed to share an unfortunate dependence on Tomás.
Nikki appeared to be in touch with reality—she saw Tomás for who he was—and she wasn’t afraid to stand up to him. How could I fail to trust somebody like that?
Yes, Tomás, beg Nikki to come back. I need her company and her friendship, too, if she is willing to give it. And I desperately need help from someone who can cook.
Although I forced myself to put a tiny bite of eggs-and-everything in my mouth, nothing could make me chew, much less swallow it. I kept as straight a face as I could and tried not to gag. I didn’t want Tomás to become suspicious before he tasted this special “treat.”
“What is this supposed to be, anyhow?” He finally gave up trying to spear a bite with his fork and used a spoon instead. He half chewed, half drank a spoonful, and I heard the crunch of eggshell across the table.
By then he had already spooned a second bite and was about to put it in his mouth. He threw it down instead, spewed a mouthful of obscenities and unswallowed breakfast, and announced he was going out and wouldn’t be back until late that night.
He grabbed a can of beer from the refrigerator and pulled the tab, making a loud poof. “This will wash the horrendous taste out of my mouth.”
I spit out what little food—poison would be a more accurate word—I had in my mouth and shuddered with relief to be rid of it. No way would I gargle with beer. I giggled at the thought and then began laughing harder.
“This meal is what I cook best,” I shouted after him, trying to maintain my balance on the chair while laughing so hard. “I am not nearly so good at cooking anything else.”
The one I cook best? I repeated those words in my mind until something clicked. Should I have cooked my culinary creation instead of serving it raw?
The front door slammed behind him, and I sighed with relief. I had planned to spend the day in my room avoiding him; it was far bigger and brighter than my cave.
Now, however, I would have the run of the apartment without having him underfoot.
I decided to practice my cooking. I had been scared that sampling my first dish might yet nauseate me, and I didn’t want my baby to be afraid of my cooking when she was old enough to eat it.
Once I realized I wasn’t going to throw up, my stomach growled loudly. No wonder. I was famished. Now was definitely the time to practice.
I looked through the refrigerator and found little more than countless cans of beer. After finally spotting another carton of eggs, I smashed half of them and emptied the contents into a bowl. This time I worked diligently to remove the pieces of shell.
Then I realized I couldn’t do anything else. I had figured out what the stove was, but not how to operate it. The stone hearths and charcoal fires the village women used for cooking were far simpler.
Would my baby girl and I die of starvation before I learned to navigate the wonders of American civilization?
I found a loaf of bread and almost swallowed several slices whole. I didn’t know anything yet about butter or jelly. Although the bread took the edge off my hunger, it didn’t compare in quantity or quality to the feast Nikki had fixed for me last night.
I gave up trying to find anything else to eat.
Nikki had shown me how to use the toilet and sink in my private bathroom the evening before, and I was thankful for that. I easily figured out what the shower was. It functioned much like the sink.
The hot running water refreshed me; how different this shower was from the cold river I had been accustomed to bathing in daily. Getting clean outside made me feel cleaner inside, too.
The baby—earlier this morning I had decided to name her Alazne if Señora Valdes was correct about the baby’s gender—approved of the gentle rainfall the shower reminded me of. She quit kicking my insides, and that helped me relax.
I could almost picture tiny Alazne lying back—or perhaps standing there—enjoying the shower with me.
After stepping out of the shower stall and toweling myself dry, I faced a new dilemma. What should I pu
t on?
Yesterday I had worn the only clothes I owned, and I had slept in them, too. I was so desperate for a piece of clean clothing I would gladly have put on something of Tomas’s.
Ha! I was far too large to fit into anything a tall, thin person like him wore comfortably. “Not even your underwear.” I sighed as loudly as if Tomás had been there to hear my complaint.
The master bedroom contained a second closet, however, and there I found Nikki’s clothes. They were gorgeous—more gorgeous than anything I had seen except in magazine photographs—but they wouldn’t fit my pregnant bulk, either.
I kept looking until I finally found what I now know was a bathrobe. It was large. I almost danced with joy when I found it would wrap all the way around me. It didn’t look like something meant for wearing outside the apartment, though.
Not that I would dare to go out by myself. I probably wouldn’t return to the right apartment. They had all looked alike from the outside hallway the day before, and since I didn’t know one number from another, I had no way to identify this apartment.
I couldn’t have gotten back inside without a key, anyhow. Any more than I could have gotten inside the village storehouse without one. That much I was sure of.
If today proved typical, I would spend the rest of my life as a prisoner in this apartment. At least I was warm and dry, and I would surely learn to cook for myself—eventually. Soon I would have Alazne to keep me company.
Life here couldn’t be any worse than it had been in the village. It might even be better. Not that I was counting on it…
A full-length mirror hung on the wall between the two closet doors. Since none existed in Santa María, I had never seen what all of me looked like—not all at once, that is—and I couldn’t keep from laughing.
From the top of my head to the top of my belly, I looked like any other young Latina lady. From my toes to my lower belly, I looked similar to the other teen girls.
But my belly? Oh, how I laughed at seeing it.
I’d seen pregnant women before. Many of them. But me?
When I saw my first beach ball months later, I remembered this moment and began laughing all over again. The resemblance couldn’t have been more perfect if someone had inflated me with a bicycle pump.
