by Roger Bruner
I understand now that American women are quite vain about their looks, and some of them take special pride in appearing skinny—too skinny. Resemblance to a big ball is not a look they are proud of.
I knew no such vanity. Pride had never played a part in my life.
I examined myself from as many angles as I could, marveling that one tiny baby—I’d seen newborns before and knew something of their size—could make me look like this.
Later, when I saw a deflated beach ball, I laughed again, for that reminded me how much my tummy had gone down in size and shape after giving birth to Alazne. Perhaps the painful screaming during childbirth was supposed to cover up the sound of the baby beach ball hissing as it lost its air.
I was still amusing myself in front of the mirror when I sensed someone else’s presence. I was terrified that Tomás had come home unexpectedly and was about to catch me prancing around in his bedroom. He would be angry. Angry or amused. One reaction would be as bad as the other.
I tightened the robe as much as I could and turned around.
7
Whew! Nikki.
Had she come back for the clothes she left behind when she stormed out earlier this morning? Or did she want to yell more harsh-sounding words and throw additional fragile objects at Tomás, watching them break into pieces against the wall each time she missed?
I nearly panicked. Would she be angry because I had put on her robe? What could I do? I was too modest to take it off in front of her.
She started talking. “I wouldn’t have believed that robe would fit you now, but it looks good on you. Better than on me, in fact.”
I shrugged helplessly, although I was no longer concerned. Her tone had said, I’m not upset. I don’t mind if you wear my robe.
She must have noticed my wet hair then—I hadn’t combed it yet—and realized I had just showered and shampooed.
“Oh, you poor thing. You don’t have any clothes of your own, do you?”
She might have been a village mother speaking to her young daughter. Her voice contained the same warmth and concern, and I instinctively reached out to accept her embrace the best I could with so much baby in the way.
Tomás was the only person who had ever hugged me before, and he had grasped me with almost-violent passion. Not tenderness like this.
I wish I could have told her how glad I was to see her, but I think she knew. I hoped she planned to stay.
“You need help, Rosa, and I’ve come back to see what I can do for you.” She spoke slowly, emphasizing each word as if that might help me better understand her strange-sounding language.
She must not have realized that her efforts to communicate that way were as useless as showing a picture to a blind man or singing a song to a deaf woman. I didn’t want her to stop talking just because I couldn’t understand her. The sound of her voice soothed my apprehensions and made me feel safe.
“Come.”
She led me by the hand to my bedroom and pointed to my old clothes. I had thrown them on the unmade bed. After much confusion using hand signs, I realized she wanted me to change back into the only clothes I had.
She left to give me privacy while I dressed, and I joined her after I had finished. When I handed her the robe, she carried it to my room, folded it neatly, and laid it across my bed.
She wanted me to keep it.
I had never received a present before. Not a real one. Tomás had once given me a special flower, a red rose to win my affection. Then he proceeded to take advantage of my innocence.
Nikki’s robe was different; it was a gift of love. Unconditional love. I could tell she didn’t expect to get anything back from me.
I laughed and cried at the same time, and so did she.
Then I noticed her staring at my tattered rags. After hours of travel the day before, I hadn’t been concerned about having a stranger see me. Having a friend see me the same way today, however, made my face burn.
Would Nikki criticize or make fun of my appearance? I couldn’t imagine it. Her kind attitude—so different from the village women’s—wouldn’t permit it.
Would she be embarrassed if people saw her with someone who resembled a beggar? That didn’t seem likely, either.
Perhaps friendship ignored such things. How could I be sure? I had never had a friend.
“Don’t worry, Rosa. I’m going to take you shopping for clothes—expensive ones—and we’ll put everything on the credit card Tomás lets me use. He owes you a great deal for taking advantage of you the way he has. Today we’ll have a good time taking advantage of him.”
I looked at her with a total lack of comprehension.
“That will make me feel better, anyhow.” Her laugh was musical, putting me at ease. She took me by the hand and led me to the door. We must be going out.
“Let him wonder where you’ve gone if he comes home.” Her eyes danced with a playfulness that didn’t require translation. “We’ll be gone for hours spending his easy-come money.”
Her laughter made me feel good. I smiled as if I had understood her because in one sense I had.
Nikki locked the door behind us. So she had a key? Hmm. Tomás must have considered it unnecessary for me to have one.
The elevator dropped so rapidly Alazne felt almost weightless for a moment, but when we jolted to a stop she kicked with all her strength. Nikki still had the key in her hand, and I wondered if the building door required its use.
Something totally unrelated popped into my head. Do you know about Tomás’s livelihood? Surely not. He would be too clever to tell you anything you might have to repeat in a court of law. If you’re as smart as I think, you’re satisfied thinking of him as a successful, small businessman. If you have suspicions about his activities, you know better than to voice them.
~*~
After countless hours of shopping, I watched Nikki turn the key to the front door of the apartment. I didn’t feel like I was coming home. Would I ever think of this apartment as a home?
Maybe I was expecting too much of one. The various village shacks that had once housed me hadn’t been home any more than the cave I had spent the last several years living in. What was one supposed to feel like, anyhow?
Maybe this apartment—like the shacks I had lived in in Santa María—was just somewhere to exist and nothing more. I couldn’t imagine I would ever feel like I belonged here.
“Belonged!” I spoke aloud in my own language, startling Nikki into dropping her key on the floor.
I smiled apologetically. My sudden insight had thrilled me from head to toe. Home must be a place where someone feels wanted. If I had to live in this apartment with just Tomás, then no, it would never be home.
As long as Nikki was here, however, this apartment might become my first real home.
Nikki, please stay.
~*~
So few things had ever belonged to me that I barely comprehended the concept of mine. Even my hand-me-downs seemed to remain the possessions of their previous owners. How often I’d had to endure their taunts…
“Rosa, you don’t look as good in that blouse as I did.”
“I filled out that skirt better than you do, you scrawny thing.”
Not only was I free of their heckling now, I was about to learn the meaning of mine.
Nikki and I had enough boxes and shopping bags to fill her trunk and backseat. Large plastic bags of various sizes overflowing with dresses, skirts, slacks, tops, shoes, undergarments I didn’t understand the use of, pocketbooks, jewelry, makeup, and even a wonderful leather coat to wear when the weather was cool.
I glanced at my new wristwatch every few seconds—as if I had any notion of how to tell time—while returning to Nikki’s car to bring in at least as many more bags of things for the baby. And then the boxes. Even the poorest of American babies had “necessities” the women of Santa María didn’t know to dream about.
Every store we went to had salesladies with name tags saying “Hablo español”—“I speak
Spanish.” I didn’t know that at the time, and Nikki didn’t realize I couldn’t read or write.
She looked confused when I didn’t address any of the salesladies in Spanish. Perhaps she thought I was shy. Or overwhelmed at shopping in a department store that was larger than all of Santa María.
“Can I help you?” the saleslady asked in English.
Was it rude to stare hard at her red hair and freckles? Nikki had wandered down the aisle and didn’t realize I needed help.
After a few seconds of confused silence, the saleslady looked at me more carefully. She seemed to notice my clothes first and then my face and hair. She must have suspected I was brand-new to this country, for she switched to Spanish. “¿Como lo puedo ayudarle? How can I help you?”
How wonderful to hear my own language again, even though I had just spoken it with Tomás a few hours earlier.
I responded so enthusiastically and appreciatively that this same lady remained with us the whole time we shopped in that store, even when we left her department. Nikki spoke in English to tell Suzi—that’s what she called the woman—what I needed, and Suzi talked with me in Spanish about the available choices.
Nikki must have told Suzi we first needed to buy something I could change into immediately. Soon I was wearing a multi-colored casual top, blue jeans, socks, underwear, and sneakers that fastened with something weird she called Velcro.
Good thing. I had seen shoelaces, but I didn’t have any idea how to tie them.
Although the other village girls always received a few new clothes when Tomás returned from San Diego, none of them had ever dressed half this well.
Once I was properly dressed, we went what I have since heard described as hog-wild. I was ecstatic over each item we selected. Surely Nikki was buying some of these clothes for herself. Ha! Ha! She was not pregnant and the clothes we were buying would have swallowed her whole.
And to think that a plastic card and an illegible scribble on a small machine allowed Nikki to buy these things for me! Why hadn’t Tomás used such a card when he was negotiating with the guard to get me across the border?
“Christmas,” Nikki said aloud. “This is better than Christmas.”
Christmas? What did that mean? How much more the day’s successes made me wish we could communicate in a single language.
“This coat will be way too big for you after you have your baby, but that’s okay. Tomás deserves to pay. If he wants me back, the bill for this outing is just part of the price he must pay.”
I shrugged and smiled. I was tired, yet happier than any time since Tomás made me think we were becoming sweethearts.
That happiness hadn’t lasted. I hoped today’s would.
Nikki and I had lunch at a nice restaurant, one I’d seen advertisements of in a magazine. By the time we returned to the apartment, I felt full and very lazy. And unexpectedly secure. At least for the moment, I could forget about being locked inside the apartment and pretend Tomás was—symbolically at least—locked outside.
He hadn’t made any effort to be my friend. Nikki, on the other hand, had already become a wonderful friend. How shocked would she be to learn she was the first friend I had ever had?
8
Like a mother cat and her unborn litter, Alazne and I napped inseparably on top of the bed in a pool of afternoon sunshine. Even though I didn’t know how to work the blinds, I wouldn’t have closed them, anyway. I had spent enough of my life in the dark. Too much.
Just as I began yawning and stretching, I heard a ruckus at the front door. I was afraid Tomás had come home sooner than expected—and was in a foul mood. Perhaps a vicious one.
I was determined not to let anything—not even Tomás—ruin this wonderful day. If he came to my room, I would pretend to be asleep.
Footsteps came down the hall, followed by a moment of quiet hesitation. My door opened. I closed my eyes and kept still. Someone walked to the edge of my bed and sat down.
I recognized Nikki’s perfume even before she spoke. “Hello, Rosa.”
Although I no longer needed to be nervous, I didn’t respond.
“Don’t worry, Rosa. I’m not Tomás. I know you’re not asleep. I can see Alazne kicking you so hard you couldn’t be.”
She laughed. Turning to face her, I sat up and we hugged.
“We had a humongous lunch,” she said, emphasizing the word humongous. “Humongous meals will put anyone to sleep.”
“Humongous?” I echoed back, trying not to laugh. No matter what the word meant, the sound of it tickled my ears.
“Yes, humongous, Rosa.”
“Humongous.” I was having fun saying it.
“Rosa is humongous, too.” She giggled and patted my stomach.
We laughed together—her at her joke and me at the way the word sounded, and neither of us understanding the other.
“You said that word perfectly, Rosa. I’ll bet you could learn English in no time at all.”
“English? Inglés?”
“Tomás won’t let me teach you that. He doesn’t want you to ‘lose your cultural identity.’ You know what I think?”
I stared at her. I understood from the raised pitch of her voice that she had asked a question. What, I couldn’t imagine.
“You don’t understand a thing I’m saying, Rosa. Not knowing how to talk to you makes me nervous, and that makes me talk more than usual. Back to what I was saying…
“I think Tomás wants to keep you from learning English—inglés, did you call it?—so you’ll remain dependent on him. He doesn’t like independent women. He feels threatened by them. I let him think he’s my master. He’s just a man, so keeping him fooled is easy.”
I had a very limited understanding of “girl talk,” and I had never had anyone to talk that way with before. Surely genuine girl talk consisted of more than the lessons the snobbish village girls used to give me about how to please the boys if they asked me to go to a place in the fields to “play.”
Who would have expected Nikki to talk with me—or even just to me—so freely on the first full day of our friendship? She didn’t seem nearly as shy as I was. Although she could tell I wasn’t taking in anything she said, she made me feel trusted by opening up to me as if we had been friends for many years.
The villagers had always viewed me with suspicion, although they didn’t have any reason to. That’s probably why I didn’t understand the concept of trust very well.
Even so, I recognized something in Nikki’s acceptance that made me love her even more.
I hugged her again—just because I could. Then we walked hand in hand to the living room.
Nikki pointed to one of the plush chairs. Although I couldn’t understand why she had suggested that one, I sat down. How she shocked me by pressing a button that caused the chair to raise my legs and recline my back.
“I’ll probably have to help you get up when supper’s ready.” She smiled and winked at me.
Then she turned on the television. This one was nothing like the ones I’d seen in magazines. The people looked almost life-size, and the sounds came from all over the room. She started handing me the remote control and then giggled when she realized I might not know what it was. She aimed it at the television and pushed a button. Then she rested it on the arm of my recliner.
I found myself watching a Spanish-language program. How wonderful that—in English-speaking America—I could listen to my native tongue at the click of a button.
Nikki reached for the remote again. Words—I had no idea what they were or what they meant—flowed across the bottom of the screen. Then she did something to make them disappear.
“Tomás would think you were trying to learn inglés if he saw closed captioning on when he came home.”
Inglés? As if I had read her mind, I wanted to make her understand me. “Don’t worry. I can’t read. Not even español. I’ll never learn inglés.”
Instead of pulling me out of my comfortable chair for supper—I remember her using the wo
rd crane although I don’t recall the other words she used—Nikki brought me a plate of food. It contained far less than we had eaten at lunchtime.
I was glad. Unless I started limiting my food intake, my beach ball might not deflate even after Alazne’s birth.
Having food available anytime I wanted it. And having enough to get full whenever I ate. Two unexpected benefits of living in Tomás’s apartment and having Nikki look after me.
I had been in bed for some time when Tomás got home. He sounded glad—perhaps more relieved than glad—to find that Nikki had returned. They didn’t argue or fight, and the smell from the kitchen said she was heating him some leftovers.
I heard them talking back and forth in English, but that didn’t bother me. I could share Nikki.
~*~
When I woke up the next morning, the sun had already been up for a while. In Santa María, I would have left my cave and gone to my keeper’s home long before now to receive my daily rations. Unheated leftovers from the day before.
How thankful I was not to have to do that anymore. Good food filled the refrigerator, and Nikki would cook a delicious breakfast whenever she got up. I hoped she would teach me to help. I hated feeling so useless.
I looked at the ocean through the kitchen window and wondered whether I would ever see it up close. I had seen pictures on television of people going to the ocean and swimming. Tomás knew how to swim. Nobody had ever wanted to teach me.
The river where I used to bathe, wash clothes, and fill my leaky clay pot with drinking water had barely been waist high. Perhaps I could go that far out into the ocean if I got the chance.
If not for my unexpected friendship with Nikki and our extended shopping session the day before, I might have felt trapped already. Tomás wouldn’t take me outside the apartment building. Not once.
He would probably consider my isolation fair punishment for trapping him with my pregnancy and my knowledge of his illegal drug dealings. How wrong he would be. He deserved to feel trapped.
