“More of NAFTA in action,” she said. “A lot of the people who live in those dumps work in the maquiladoras.”
“The what?” Pamela asked. She sounded distracted.
“The border factories. Otherwise known as sweatshops. There’s more than a hundred in Nogales alone. Foreign-owned, mostly. American, German, Japanese. No environmental regulations to worry about. Cheap labor, happy to work six days a week, ten hours a day, for ten bucks a day, and no overtime. Pay overtime to your workers and Walmart might have to charge an extra dollar or two for that hot new flat-screen TV.”
“My mom, the socialist,” Nick said, in a tone that communicated affectionate forbearance for her political tirades.
“I’m no mealymouthed socialist, I’m a communist,” she replied, and Pamela laughed.
Lisette was glad to hear it, that light trill. Her partner (the term they used for each other, as if they were in a law practice) was over her fright and out of her funk. Lisette didn’t expect Pamela to like her Mexico, poor, gritty, and perilous, but hoped she would not detest it and would agree to live with her in San Patricio through the coming spring and summer. Pamela’s schedule fit into the scheme; she taught art at the University of Arizona, but only in the fall semester. Half a year together, half apart—not a bad arrangement, Lisette thought. Better than their present setup, and they would not get bored with each other or on each other’s nerves, knowing that they would catch a break when the fall term started. All Pamela all the time might be trying. She was high-maintenance. Not in the way Tony had been—sex every other night or he grew surly—but in her need to be assured that she was bright, talented, beautiful, desirable. She was forty-four and looked thirty to everyone except herself. There seemed to be a distorting lens in her head that wrinkled her skin, slabbed pounds onto her slender body, thinned her full, honey-blond hair, and dulled the luster in her hazel eyes. Witty, well-educated people intimidated her, though she’d graduated with honors from the Rhode Island School of Design. Galleries in New York, San Francisco, and Santa Fe showed her work, but a snippy review or, worse, no review—the ignominy of being ignored—could drop her into a whirlpool of self-doubt. “Sold three paintings,” she’d e-mailed a while ago from an exhibition in Dallas. “Art News review attached. Maybe he’s right—I’m like that guy in the Somerset Maugham story, only he had the decency to realize he was a mediocrity and quit.” Lisette didn’t know what story she was referring to, and the review (after she translated the art-speak argot into English) did not enlighten her because it made no mention of Somerset Maugham; nor did it say that Pamela was a mediocrity, only that her paintings, while very good, fell short of the brilliance her earlier work had promised.
What was wrong with being very good, if not quite a genius? Pamela’s lack of confidence mystified Lisette. Pamela had been born into riches; Lisette had grown up in the North Carolina mountains, daughter of a part-Catawba waitress and a failed Christmas-tree farmer who died when she was seventeen. Pamela’s talent was effortless, or seemed so; Lisette thought of herself as a grind, her sole gift the mulish perseverance, the slogging industriousness that had hauled her out of hillbilly country into the University of North Carolina on a scholarship, and had gotten her through med school at age forty-five. Pamela had a supermodel’s stature and beauty; at five feet three, Lisette was a bit undersized and plain besides, her best feature a head of curly, chocolate-brown hair that diverted attention from her workaday face, a mountain woman’s face like her mother’s, all hollows and sharp ridges.
During her undergraduate days at Chapel Hill, she had grown a grapefruit-sized chip on her shoulder. She was the upcountry hick surrounded by pretty, privileged sorority girls exempt from the need for scholarships or student loans, as well as from the need to study hard, either because their futures were guaranteed or because they were smart as well as loaded. She envied and despised them for their unearned self-assurance.
The chip had since shrunk to, oh, maybe a lemon, but it was still there. When she’d met Pamela in Tucson last fall, at a fund-raiser for Lisette’s nonprofit, the Clínica Libre, her first impression had been stupidly knee-jerk. The host, Manny Cardenas, introduced Pamela as “Pam Childress, you know, the famous artist.” Lisette looked up at the poised, statuesque woman in the dark blue cocktail dress, fully prepared to envy and despise her. “The most famous artist you never heard of,” Pamela said, her smile revealing a mouthful of crooked teeth, her hand rising immediately to cover them. Lisette dismissed the remark as false humility. It was the imperfection and the quick, embarrassed gesture to hide it that moved her to hold off on the envying and despising.
“Lemme show you something,” Manny said, gesturing with his chin toward his den. Carrying their margaritas, they followed him into the room, furnished with a few stylish pieces that were overwhelmed by nouveau-riche touches—hideous lamps, ceramic tchotchkes, a glass-fronted liquor cabinet displaying a single-malt scotch collection, a TV as big as a 1940s movie screen. (Manny was a San Patricio native who, with his parents, had scraped his back on a barbed-wire border fence when he was six. Now, fifty-odd years later, he was the luxury car king of Tucson, owning a chain of Lexus and BMW dealerships.) He pointed at a four-by-three-foot canvas hanging on the wall opposite the TV. It showed dramatic, jagged red shapes—rocks, Lisette assumed—thrust up from what appeared to be a canyon floor splashed with green and purple and yellow spots. Trees? Cacti? Desert flowers?
“Bought that way before I knew Pam. It’s one of her best,” he gushed. “Five thou I paid for it, and an appraiser told me it’s worth three times that today!”
Pamela cringed and said, “Manny, please…”
“Ah, you don’t toot your own horn, so I’m tootin’ it for you. It’s a masterpiece, right?” Then, addressing Lisette: “But don’t take my word for it. Lissen to this.”
He lifted a corner of the painting and pulled a commentary from a plastic envelope stapled to the backing. “I don’t understand half of what this guy is saying, but I get the idea—it’s a masterpiece.”
He held the sheet out at arm’s length and began to recite, like a kid reading his sixth-grade essay in front of the class. Pamela cringed further. As Lisette would learn later, the applause and praises she craved discomposed her when she got them. “Manny, please, please stop it,” she said, interrupting the oration.
“Okay. Whatever you say. But you’re too polite, you know that?” His glance rested briefly on the cleavage peering ever so shyly from above the bodice of Pamela’s dress. Briefly, but long enough to make it obvious that he had an eye for more than her work. “Lemme tell you what polite gets you in this country. The hole in the doughnut is what it gets you.”
“I will be sure to keep that in mind. Thanks for pointing it out. I hope I’m not being too polite, thanking you,” Pamela said, and Lisette liked the way she said it, in a husky voice, an unfiltered-Camel sort of voice, tinged by just the right touch of bitchiness.
After Manny left, the two women stayed in the den, talking on the sofa beneath the painting. Pamela was new to Tucson. She’d been teaching at the Art Institute in Chicago, but when a gig opened at the U. of A., she jumped on it. Couldn’t face another Windy City winter. Wait till the summer, Lisette said. Hundred degrees in the shade, and don’t listen to that crap about a dry heat. You’ll be wishing for a blast of December air off Lake Michigan.
Lisette knew she should be circulating among the guests, chatting up potential donors instead of Pamela. That’s what she was doing—chatting her up and feeling awkward about it. Always there was the awkwardness upon meeting a woman who charmed and intrigued her (though “always” was an overstatement; she’d had only two lesbian affairs). The awkwardness and looking for signs to answer the question, Is she or isn’t she?
They kept the conversation on neutral ground. Pamela asked, Just what is the Clínica Libre? A private health clinic in a Mexican pueblo, San Patricio. About a six-hour drive from here. Six hours and somewhere between half a centu
ry and a century. We—that’s a nurse and me—work with the public health clinics in the municipality. Five to serve more than a hundred and fifty communities. Lisette was aware that she sounded a little stilted, as though she were making a pitch for a contribution. Pamela edged closer, a knee lightly brushing hers, resting there. Unsure if the touch was intentional or accidental, Lisette resisted an impulse to return the pressure and swung her knees aside. But not too far, nor too abruptly, to avoid sending the wrong signal in case it had been intentional. Pamela said she was confused. A pueblo. A municipality. One hundred and fifty communities. What was all that? Ah, yes. A municipality in Mexico was like a county in the States, and it usually had the same name as its principal town, Lisette explained. So the pueblo of San Patricio was like the county seat for the municipality of San Patricio and all the villages in it. Indian villages, mostly. Mayos, Pimas, a few Tarahumaras, all so poor that they often paid her fees with chickens, tortillas, or something they’d grown. Tomatoes. Green chilies. Pamela laughed, the first time Lisette had heard her laughter, and it was clear and rippling and captivating.
“Manny would say you’ve got the hole in the doughnut. I mean, you could be earning zillions practicing here, couldn’t you?”
“Not zillions,” Lisette replied. “But for sure I wouldn’t be depositing chickens and chili peppers in my bank account. That’s why I’m hustling Manny’s moneybag friends. Speaking of which, I’d better get back to it. A pleasure to meet the most famous artist I’ve never heard of.”
She stood, smoothed her skirt, and extended a hand. Pamela rose and took it. Her eyes, cast down to meet Lisette’s, wore a plaintive, almost childlike expression that made Lisette feel she was the taller of the two. Neither made a move toward the door.
“Are you in Tucson for long?”
“A couple, three days. Buy some stuff I need for the clinic, visit my son. He started U. of A. this fall.”
“Oh! You’re married?”
“Was. We split up a few years ago, after I decided to go back to med school. Tony’s a doctor, and he felt that one MD in the family was enough. Or maybe it was because he’s Cuban—y’know, he was Ricky Ricardo but I was miscast as Lucy. I kept his name. Moreno works better in Mexico than Bowden.” She knew this was far more information than had been requested. She was under some compulsion to tell Pamela all about herself, or as much as she could in the next minute or two. “We met in Miami. He was interning there, and I’d just started med school. We met and got married and I quit when I got pregnant the first time.”
“You’ve got two kids, then?”
“Nope. I miscarried. Nick came along three years later, and…” She put the brakes on her mouth. “Christ, listen to me. I’d best get back to the party.”
“To be continued,” Pamela said, a lift in her raspy voice turning the statement into a question, one that appealed for an affirmative answer.
“To be continued,” Lisette said.
“When?”
The bottom seemed to drop out of her stomach as Pamela licked the salt from the rim of her margarita glass with the innocence of a schoolgirl licking an ice-cream cone. It was incredibly provocative because it didn’t try to be. That’s what kindled Lisette, damn near unhinged her, so that her voice trembled slightly when she answered, “Tomorrow. Lunch or dinner?”
“Dinner would be nice.”
Lisette felt a squeeze in her belly. Lunch foreclosed on further developments; dinner promised them.
* * *
So they continued the next evening over tapas and glasses of malbec at Vicentes, in downtown Tucson. Lisette did not pick up where she’d left off, stifling another impulse to talk about herself. Self-revelation was not in her character. She’d inherited the reticence of her people. Those hickory-hard, work-worn Appalachians did not regard their lives and innermost thoughts and feelings as fascinating topics of conversation, as seemed to be the case with other Americans these days, encouraged by social media and something in the zeitgeist to blab incessantly about themselves. Another point in Pamela’s favor: she possessed a becoming reserve, partly natural, partly indoctrinated by her upper-crust family, among whom, Lisette gathered, baring your soul was considered no less tacky than baring your ass at the country club, and wasn’t half as much fun.
Pamela had grown up on Philadelphia’s Main Line, in a suburb called Gladwyne. “Money so old it’s senile,” she said. Though it was intended as ridicule, the remark awakened the class warrior in Lisette. Meaning what? she wondered. That it’s so old and senile it’s forgotten it’s money? She was tempted to come back with reverse snobbery, a recitation of the tough times in Watauga County, North Carolina, after her father died and the farm was lost to foreclosure and she had to waitress part-time alongside her mother at a diner in Boone to make ends meet. I pulled myself up by the bra straps, pretty lady, and would’ve taken any money, regardless of its age or mental condition. She stifled that, too, choosing instead to present a slightly amusing picture of herself as a tomboy, taking a chain saw to Fraser firs, baling and loading the trees onto trucks with her father and younger brother. Hunting and fishing with them on weekends and school holidays. “Ah kin shoot you a squirrel, gut hit, skin hit, and cook hit, too!” she joked, parodying the accent to draw a laugh from Pamela. How she adored that laugh, the tingling sensation it made, like fingertips running over her skin.
Pamela asked, “So how old were you when you went back to med school?”
“Thirty-nine, on final approach to forty.”
“Holy moly! If I went back to high school right now, I’d flunk out.”
Lisette couldn’t remember the last time she’d heard someone exclaim “Holy moly.” She said, “It took me almost five years instead of the standard four. The chem and biology courses were tough in Spanish. I’d studied Spanish in high school and I was married to a Cuban for fifteen years, but it was still tough.”
“Spanish?”
“Right. I forgot to mention. I scored pretty well on my MCATs, but no med school in the States would admit a thirty-nine-year-old woman with a kid. Or without one, for that matter. I got accepted in Mexico, the Autonomous University of Guadalajara.”
“And that’s why you’re down there?”
“Partly. If you’re asking if I’m licensed to practice in the States, yeah, I am. I passed the exams.”
“But … but … how do I say this? You go through all that, five years in your forties, with a kid, yet…”
“Nick—that’s my son—Nick wasn’t with me. His father took custody. I asked him to. I’ll say that for him: he didn’t object.”
“All right. You go through all that and you end up in that little burg, getting paid with chickens and chilies. Why would you do that? It doesn’t make sense. Oh, damn! That didn’t come out the way I meant it to.”
“That’s okay. I get that all the time on this side of the line. Did I order my MD from Amazon? Am I on the run from a malpractice suit?”
Pamela’s eyebrows arced. “Christ, no! I didn’t mean that. I was just—”
“Here’s the story, short version. The Mexican government requires each new doctor to work for a year in a public health clinic. The Mexicans are more civilized than we are when it comes to that. I was assigned to a clinic in Hermosillo, and that took me out to San Patricio and into the Sierra Madre, and, well … I thought I knew poverty, but that made me realize I couldn’t even spell it. So when my year was up … not to sound all noble and altruistic … I saw a chance to make a difference, and I started my clinic.”
Pamela met this speech with a transactional smile. The movement to cover her jumbled teeth was not as quick this time, and instead of her full hand, only two fingers went to her lips, as if she were brushing off a crumb. The flaw in her beauty—that was the key to her allure. It made her seem attainable.
“Nick thinks I’m fatally attracted to the marginalized,” Lisette went on. “He thinks I get off on playing the great white medicine woman. He doesn’t say so, but
it’s what he thinks.”
“I don’t think so at all,” Pamela said in a peculiar, thrilling voice. “I think you’re a remarkable woman.”
A remarkable woman. Had anyone ever called her that before? Lisette didn’t consider herself susceptible to flattery; but it wasn’t flattery causing her to feel flustered and excited and embarrassed all at once.
“Don’t make me blush,” she said.
“How about the movies tomorrow night? There’s a Turkish movie playing at that art house on Speedway. The Loft.”
“I’m not wild about art films, but I’ll give it a shot. I’ll pick you up.”
* * *
“You said last night, ‘Don’t make me blush.’ Did I make you just now?”
Lisette flicked on the vanity lights alongside her rearview mirror.
“You decide,” she said, her heart beating violently.
Pamela cupped her chin and turned her head to one side, then the other. “I don’t think so. You’re not the blushing type, I guess.”
“Maybe it’s shock. Nobody has ever kissed me like that.”
“I’m normally not that way. So forward. I had to know. I was dying to know. You don’t give off any signals…”
“You don’t wave a lot of flags yourself,” Lisette said.
“No? I thought I did. I couldn’t tell about you and I had to know, and that was the only way I could think of to find out.”
They were parked in the driveway of Pamela’s small rented house in the Sam Hughes neighborhood, near the university. Lisette felt bold and wild and wonderfully irresponsible as she turned off the interior lights, then the ignition. “I think the old question Your place or mine? doesn’t need an answer,” she said.
Some Rise by Sin Page 7
