by Héctor Tobar
Araceli waited. She had spent her formative years in Mexico City lines standing before elevator doors and cash registers, in buses stranded before stoplights, and in constipated thoroughfares, but it seemed illogical to find herself waiting in this open, empty stretch of California. Making a Mexican woman stand under this bus sign for thirty minutes was a final subtraction from all that was supposed to be relaxing, leisurely, and languorous about these neighborhoods by the sea. When her time became her own again, when she was a woman with a party outfit stuffed into a travel bag, Araceli reverted to the city dweller she was by birth; she was in more of a hurry, restless. Ya, vámonos, ándale, let’s get moving. ¡Ya! In Nezahualcóyotl, you didn’t have to walk twenty minutes to get to the bus stop, all you had to do was walk half a block, and there would be two or three buses waiting for you, double-parked, the drivers honking at one another and all the taxis and shuttle vans around them. No one complained: that was life in Mexico City, you waited as the multitudes shuffled around you, jabbing elbows into your chest, pushing grocery bags into your stomach. Araceli never would have imagined herself also waiting in the United States, so pathetically alone on a winding road.
Not long after Araceli walked out the door, Maureen noticed that Samantha had worked bits of clay into the zipper of her yellow pajama jumpsuit, a discovery that caused Maureen to feel the sudden weight of motherly sleeplessness behind her pupils. Looking up at the clock, she noticed her morning sense of being fully awake and alert had not lasted past nine-thirty. As soon as a baby entered the world, you were sentenced to two years of interrupted sleep, unless genetic probability favored you with the rare “easy baby,” the ones fated to become grown-ups with the gentle dispositions of Buddhist priests. In three tries Maureen had never been so blessed; each child had sapped a bit of her youth with nights similar to the last one, which had been interrupted by Samantha’s cries at 12:04 a.m., 2:35 a.m., and 4:36 a.m. The years of infant and toddler helplessness took a toll on a mother’s body too; they were an unexpected extension of those nine months of gestation that a mother endured not in her womb and hips, but rather in the muscles around her eyes, and in her arms and spine. This Saturday would begin with the cleaning of this clay-covered baby and move later to the harried cooking of lunch and dinner, all the while keeping an eye on the boys so that they didn’t spend too much time on their electronic toys, and on Samantha to make sure she didn’t injure herself, and would end with the washing of the dishes in the evening after she had put her children to bed.
On most days Maureen didn’t mind the responsibility; she felt the purpose and nobility of motherhood flowing through her body like warm blood, and saw those exalted notions alive in the healthy, glowing skin of her children and in the nurturing home she had built around them. Today would not be one of those days. Today she would see only the frayed ends of a family project that was subtly coming apart, with two boys of growing muscle mass and bad attitude, and little time for the arranging, sorting, and creating that made up Maureen’s notion of what family life should look like. In the back of the closet a year of the boys’ schoolwork and art projects were gathering dust because Maureen didn’t have the time to catalogue them as was her wont, nor had she filed away the pictures from Samantha’s first birthday. If Samantha napped and Scott did the dishes she might get to those things today. He was probably hiding in that carpeted nook of his, with a game, and thinking of this she felt the sense of petty injustice that overcomes a slave upon learning she is carrying the heaviest rocks of all.
All the disciplined orderliness and empty lawns of the Laguna Rancho Estates disappeared in the barrio where Araceli’s friend Marisela lived. The Santa Ana neighborhood was cluttered and improvised, and the homes stucco and clapboard, ash-gray and flaky fuchsia. There were palm trees and olive trees and avocado trees and jacarandas, some overgrown and older than any of the homes, with tree roots buckling the sidewalks into waves. Some lawns were green squares of watered perfection, and others were eaten up with patches of dust upon which lawn chairs and frayed couches rested, and clusters of people sat talking with wide sweeping gestures, while women and children stood on the porches behind them and examined the landscape like mariners on the prow of a ship.
The bus stopped on Maple Street and Araceli stepped off and walked a few blocks to the white wood-frame house where Marisela lived with a family from Zacatecas. She climbed onto the porch, which was covered with a worn carpet of plastic grass, opened the screen door, and entered the uniquely Mexican set of cultural contradictions that was the home of Octavio Covarrubias, a longtime friend of Marisela’s family and the owner of this house. She found him in a torso-swallowing blue lounge chair: he was reading, in a rather conspicuous display of his lefty bona fides, the Sunday edition of the Mexico City daily newspaper La Jornada, which he received by mail every week, devouring its star-studded lineup of radical Mexican literary and political commentators. Covarrubias was a semiretired carpenter and one of the thousands of proletarian, Spanish-speaking autodidact intellectuals scattered across the Southern California metropolis, and he had two large moles above his left eye that he called Io and Europa, after the moons of Jupiter. His wife and adolescent progeny, meanwhile, were sitting semierect on a couch as they absorbed the pings, sizzles, and cheers of a television broadcasting a Mexico City–based variety show hosted by a garrulous man whose vulgar shtick annoyed thoughtful people on both sides of the border. The living room décor further echoed the contrasts between high and low culture, with the velvet painting of tongue-wagging dogs on one wall looking across the space at the bowed, dignified heads of the mother and child in a Siqueiros woodcut on the other. Even on the bookshelf, the gravitas of Elena Poniatowska and José Emilio Pacheco were pushing up against the pulp crime of Los secretos del cartel del Golfo and The True Story of Los Zetas, announcing to Araceli her arrival at the home of a workingman grappling for ideas, arguments, and facts to understand his world.
Octavio lowered his newspaper to say “Hola, Araceli, ¿qué tal?”
Araceli returned the greeting and asked if Marisela was in.
“She’s waiting for you.”
Araceli zigzagged around the children in the living room and made her way to the last bedroom in the back, where she found Marisela lying on her back on a bed, pushing buttons on her cell phone.
“No one ever calls me,” Marisela said without looking at Araceli. She was a short and roundish young woman who always wore jeans that were a size too small. Araceli liked Marisela because she was blunt and often unaware of the fact that she was offending people, and because she was a chilanga, a Mexico City native. They had met in a Santa Ana thrift store, two Latinas sorting through the same rack of men’s vests, and weeks later it was Marisela who introduced Araceli to the friend who knew a gringa in Laguna Rancho who in turn knew another gringa, named Maureen Thompson, who was looking for a new maid.
“The only call I got today was from el viejo,” Marisela said, turning on her side to look at her friend now. “He didn’t even ask how I was doing before telling me he needed money.”
“Is your brother still sick?”
“No, he got better. Now they need one hundred dollars because there’s a hole in the roof.”
Once it had been taboo to complain about their families and the demands they made. A Mexican daughter in exile was supposed to place individual ambitions aside and make ample cash transfers in the name of younger siblings and nephews. So their money flowed southward, every month without fail, even as the months and years passed and the voices on the other end of the telephone became older and more distant. Their U.S. wages fertilized a tree of family narratives that had grown many new and gnarly branches that no longer involved them directly. Now Araceli and Marisela complained openly and without guilt, because it had become painfully clear that their families didn’t understand the complications of life in the supposedly affluent United States of America, and because their relatives were using their telephones as probes to discover
how deep the well of dollars went, as if they sensed, correctly, that the faraway daughters in exile were squirreling away money for their own selfish use.
“I’m going to send them fifty instead of one hundred,” Marisela said.
“They need to learn to take care of their own problems,” Araceli said, the phrase having become a refrain in their conversations.
“Exactly. I’m going to keep that extra fifty dollars to buy another hat like this one I’m going to wear tonight. I got it at that new place on Main Street. Let me show you.”
Marisela went to the closet and emerged with a cowboy hat made of black jute straw, its brim bent up saucily on two sides, like a bird about to thrust its wings downward. “Qué bonito,” Araceli said through half-gritted teeth, because they had an unspoken agreement not to speak ill of each other’s party clothes, what with Marisela’s having adopted the rural, denim-centered tastes of the Zacatecas people who dominated this neighborhood, while Araceli stuck stubbornly to the pop-inspired trends of Mexico City.
“And it hardly cost me anything at all.”
Several hours later, after watching a bit of television in the living room, and then getting themselves dressed and primped in Marisela’s bedroom and bathroom, they were out on the street and walking down Maple Street, headed to a quinceañera party. Marisela wore her new hat and a pair of jeans with arabesque-patterned rhinestones swaying on the back pockets. Araceli had let her hair down so that it reached halfway to her waist, brushing it out for a good long while. The effect of this liberated mane on her appearance was striking to anyone who knew Araceli the maid: all the tension of her workday face disappeared, and with her temples freed of the pulling strain of the buns in which she imprisoned her hair, her face took on the relaxed expression of a young woman without children to take care of or meals to prepare. She was wearing her “Saturday night chilanga uniform”: short black leggings with flamingo-colored trim that reached halfway down her calves, a black miniskirt with a few sequins, and a T-shirt with the word love across the front, a peace symbol filling the o. Three strands of necklaces made of raspberry-colored plastic rocks, and a few matching bracelets, were her chief accessories. It was a bold statement of where she came from. Similar versions of her uniforme de chilanga had previously earned Araceli a derisive comment or two from Marisela. “You know that people here think you look ridiculous. This isn’t the Condesa district.”
“That, my dear, is precisely the point.”
But today Marisela also kept to their pact and said nothing as they walked to the party, her teeth gleaming in their ruby lipstick frame, the most expressive part of her face, given the large, wraparound sunglasses she was wearing, another example of norteño chic, with encrusted “diamonds” on each side, eyewear that possessed an aeronautical quality, as if Marisela were preparing to be the first Zacatecas astronaut blasted into space.
“I don’t really know the people at this party that well,” Marisela was saying. “The girl who is having the quinceañera, her name is Nicolasa. She’s very tall, very pretty. I know her aunt, Lourdes is her name, because I used to work with her at that clothes factory.”
“I remember you telling me about Lourdes.”
“Actually, I do know some chisme about these people.” It was more tragedy than gossip, a story with dark, nausea-inducing contours, complete with psychopathic border smugglers and a father who disappeared once the family was safely ensconced in California. Abandoned with two children, Nicolasa’s mother had soldiered on until illness struck. “She got too sick to work, and too sick to even take care of the kids. So some people from the government came by and took the kids. They put them in something called Foster Care.”
“Foster” was one of those words than never quite found a home in Araceli’s mental arrangement of the English language. She’d heard it before and sometimes confused it with “faster”—much in the same way some English speakers themselves confused words like “gorilla” and “guerrilla,” or “pretext” and “pretense”—and she’d wondered if the American fix to broken families known as Foster Care somehow involved finding the quickest solution possible: instant guardians for the parentless, quick meals for the unfed.
“In Foster Care they separate siblings,” Marisela continued. “So this girl and her brother lived in different places for, like, three or four years.”
“What about the mother?”
“She died.”
“Dios mío.”
“I wish I could remember what she had.” “AIDS?”
“No, it was something more like cancer. But anyways, my friend Lourdes tried for a long time to get them out of Foster Care. They tried looking for the father too. Finally Lourdes’s sister and brother-i n-l aw tried to adopt them, but of course it took forever, because they were stuck in Foster Care and once they’re in that I guess it’s really hard to get them out.”
The story stayed with Araceli as she walked with Marisela past old bungalows whose windows and doors were open to catch a breeze in the final hours of a dying summer afternoon. Araceli saw kitchen walls shimmering in stark incandescent light, and heard a radio tuned to a Spanish-language broadcast of a baseball game, and a murmur of voices followed by a chorus of laughter, and she wondered about the voices she could not hear, and the tales of betrayal and loss they might tell. Araceli knew she could knock on any door, ask a question or two, and find herself inside a melodrama about a family forced to endure separation and travel great distances, and to struggle with the authorities and with their own self-destructive foibles.
They arrived at a bungalow decorated with a string of lights gathering in luminance in the twilight, its unseen backyard pulsating with accordions, trumpets, and clarinets. Marisela and Araceli had missed the actual quinceañera ceremony, because it had started on schedule, in violation of the Mexican social conventions Marisela and Araceli still followed, although they had arrived in plenty of time for the party that followed. After pushing in a splintery wooden gate, the two women stepped onto a concrete patio thick with more spectacled recruits to the Zacatecas space program who were shuffling about in cowboy boots and swaying inside jeans, while streamers dangled over their heads, brushing against the tops of their ten-gallon hats.
Following Marisela, Araceli cut through the dancers and found her way to a corner, against a wooden fence, where the nondancers held plastic cups and studied the patterns of the shifting feet on the dance floor with serious eyes, as if trying to decipher the meaning of the interlocking circles. Three pairs of women were dancing together, which was not unusual at these parties, the men of northern Mexico being a shy bunch, and when the music stopped and another song started, Marisela turned to Araceli to ask, “¿Bailamos?“ In an instant they were dancing on the patio, Araceli laughing loudly as she led her friend in a merry-go-round waltz, their legs intertwined and arms around each other’s waists. “Just watch,” Marisela shouted into Araceli’s ear above the music. “We dance like this once, and all these guys will be all over us.” Soon enough, several paisanos holding beers were trying very hard to look unimpressed by the sight of a tall woman with thick polyester legs protruding from her miniskirt, spinning deftly in her checkerboard flats and dancing cheek-to-cheek with her short friend in the persimmon-colored blouse.
When Araceli and Marisela stopped dancing, a young man in a baseball cap stepped out of the crowd and grinned and squinted into Marisela’s sunglasses, as if studying himself in the reflection there. He spoke words Araceli did not hear, and when the music started again he pulled Marisela into the center of the patio, and soon they were swallowed up in the mass of moving bodies like rocks plopping into a lake.
Araceli walked to the fence on the edge of the patio and prepared herself for the possibility that none of the brass-buckled astronauts would step forward and lead her back out onto the concrete floor to spin around. When Marisela finishes with that little guy she doesn’t seem to like so much, maybe we can dance again. At that instant, Araceli felt a tap on the sh
oulder and turned to see a lofty mass of flesh and denim standing before her. He was a man of about her own age, but significantly taller, with a head that was sprouting a full fountain of sexy, moist black curls. “¿Quieres bailar?“ he asked. Where did you come from? she wanted to say, and soon found one of her hands rising for the nameless man to guide her onto the patio. Her partner was husky but moved well, clasping her hands with confidence and with the slightly callused, blackish bronze hands of a man who earns his living outdoors. As they spun to the repetitive swirl of the trumpet and clarinets, Araceli took in the motion of his slacks, the churn of his shirt. Little miracles like this happened to people like Marisela all the time, but only very rarely to Araceli: to meet a stranger and, in an instant, to find herself moving in synchronicity with him.
Halfway through that first song, he leaned over as they danced, pressed his cheek against hers, and said, loud enough to be heard against the blaring music, “Hey, you dance well!”
