“Not no food.” The wine loosened my tongue. I leaned toward her. “You are not right. Most girls in Mexico are not fat. Girls are fatter here,” I said, and she twisted her mouth and looked away.
She thought a moment and then turned back, smiling again. “Maybe that’s because the food’s better here,” she said.
“No.”
She looked at me sharply. “What?” she asked, ready to laugh. “You think the food is better in Mexico?”
“My grandmother is a better cook,” I said, nodding toward the kitchen.
That struck her as funny, very funny. She laughed so hard and long that Inez came back in to see what was happening. I shrugged, and she returned to the kitchen. Sophia stopped laughing suddenly and stared at me.
“Your grandmother,” she said. “That’s not my mother’s mother, right?”
For a long moment, I did not reply. How could she ask such a question? Did my aunt Isabela not tell her children anything about her own parents, at least that they were both dead and gone?
I shook my head.
“I didn’t think so,” Sophia said. “C’mon,” she told me, rising. “Let’s go up to my room. I have something to show you.”
Just as I stood, Jesse came down the stairs and headed for the kitchen with the tray of dishes and glasses from his and Edward’s dinner. He glanced at me with scorn and continued walking.
“Well, look who’s here,” Sophia said. “Edward’s nurse. Is that what you want to be when you grow up, Jesse, a nurse, maybe a wet nurse?”
“I am grown-up,” he replied. “But you have plenty of time to decide what you want to be, since you have a long way to go to grow up.”
“Very funny. Isn’t he hilarious?” she asked me.
Jesse kept walking.
“C’mon,” she said, and walked quickly toward the stairway. For a moment, she had to seize hold of the banister, because she was so dizzy. She regained her balance and climbed the steps as quickly as she could. I followed slowly.
“Will you catch up?” she screamed back at me. Everything she was doing now was exaggerated, whether it was talking too loudly or making a face. I felt what the little wine I had drunk was doing to me and could see clearly how so much more of it was affecting her.
She stopped at Edward’s doorway to wait for me.
“We have to see how my brother’s doing,” she said with a wry smile.
I started to shake my head, but she seized the door-knob and opened the door. I could hear Jesse coming up the stairs quickly behind me. I paused, because Sophia stepped back instead of forward.
“Jesus,” she said.
I walked slowly toward her and got to the door just as Jesse came up the stairs. Sophia nodded, urging me to look into Edward’s room.
He was facedown on his bed, totally naked.
Jesse charged up to the doorway.
“You two are sick,” Sophia said.
“I’m just giving him a rubdown, stupid. He’s sore from being bedridden.”
“Right. C’mon, Delia, before I throw up.”
“Jesse?” Edward called. “What’s going on?”
“Nothing,” Jesse replied. He mumbled some curse, entered the room, and closed the door. We heard him lock it.
“If my mother saw that, she’d have a heart attack,” Sophia told me. “So, if you want to kill her, tell her.” She headed for her room.
I stood there looking after her. Could she possibly know that her mother wanted me to do exactly that, report anything I had seen to her?
“Will you come on?” she cried from her doorway. “You move like an old lady.”
I was tempted to go to my own room and lock the door, too, but I followed her. She flopped onto her bed.
“Shut the door!” she ordered, and gestured.
I closed it and stood there. She closed her eyes, and I thought for a moment that she was just going to fall asleep. I wished she would, but her eyes snapped open, and she sat up quickly.
“Come here,” she said, and nodded at the chair beside her night table. Then she pulled her legs back and sprawled on her stomach, reaching for a pillow at the same time. She folded her arms and positioned herself to rest her head on the pillow and look at me in the chair. I walked slowly to it and sat. For a few moments, she just stared at me. It made me uncomfortable. What did she want?
“You know enough English to tell me what Mr. Baker did to you at the rented house?”
“No,” I said, shaking my head. “Too much to tell.”
“Did you do it with him, too? Did he make you?”
I shook my head. She looked disappointed.
“He never tried anything with me,” she said, sounding unhappy about it. “He was a lousy teacher. He had bad breath. My mother hired him just to torment me.”
She stared at me again, making me feel very uncomfortable.
“What about in Mexico?” she asked.
“In Mexico?”
“You did it with boys there?”
“No.”
“Bradley was the first?”
I didn’t answer, which was an answer for her.
“Oh, I get it. You people in Mexico don’t believe in birth control, right? No stopping birth,” she added when I grimaced with a bit of confusion. “You have lots of babies. Where are your sisters, your brothers?”
“No sisters, no brothers.”
“Just you?” She pushed herself up to a sitting position. “Why? Your father had birth control?”
“No more babies,” I said. I didn’t know the details about it, but I understood there was a reason my mother couldn’t have another child. We just didn’t talk about it.
“Probably decided not to have one and used something,” Sophia thought aloud. “If it wasn’t for my father, my mother wouldn’t have had Edward or me,” she added. “My father wanted children, not my mother, understand?”
“Sí, I understand.”
She studied me again and smiled.
“You know, you might be pregnant. Maybe there is a baby in you,” she said. “Bradley’s baby.”
I started to shake my head.
“Did you get your period…bleeding?”
“No, not time for it,” I said.
“So? You don’t know,” she said, satisfied.
The thought had passed through my mind, but I had chased it off so quickly it had been forgotten until now.
“Don’t worry. If you’re pregnant, I’m sure my mother will have it taken care of…abortion. Unless you’re so religious you won’t do it.”
I didn’t answer. I wouldn’t let myself think about it.
She smiled. “My mother would make you. She would be too embarrassed to have a pregnant teenage girl in the house. You have to be more careful, now that you’re going to have a boyfriend.”
She reached down to the bottom drawer in her night table and pulled it open to pluck out a small case. She smiled at me.
“Know what this is?”
I shook my head.
She opened it and took out a dome-shaped rubber disc.
“It’s called a diaphragm. My mother got it for me. Do you know what this does?”
I knew, but I had never seen one. Tía Isabela had bought it for her? It was like sending her out to be promiscuous, I thought, or at least accepting it. The widening of my eyes made her laugh.
“Don’t look so surprised. She just came to me one day and said, ‘I know you’re not going to be careful, Sophia, so I want you to be protected.’ She was right about that,” she added, and laughed again. Then she grew serious. “You need one of these. My mother should get one for you, too. I’ll show you how it works.”
She showed me the spermicidal jelly she smeared in and around it and began to describe how she inserted it. I imagined she had not studied or mastered anything at school with as much enthusiasm.
“I haven’t used it yet. The first time was supposed to be with you-know-who, but he wasn’t as interested in me as he was in you.” Thinkin
g about Bradley brought the rage back into her face. She put her diaphragm away, slamming the drawer closed, and fell back on her bed.
“I’ve got a headache,” she said. “I ate too much.” She leaned on her elbow and looked at me. “Don’t you eat too much ever?”
“Sí,” I said. “When mi abuela Anabela makes her chocolate mole chicken. She makes the best guacamole and the best burritos. I work with her in the kitchen. She has taught me many things her mother taught her.”
It looked as if hearing about my good family memories made her angry, so I stopped.
“You obviously miss her. Why did you leave her if you miss her so much?”
“She wanted me to come here. She is ninety years old and was afraid for me.”
“If she was afraid for you, she shouldn’t have sent you here,” Sophia said, lying back again. “Look at what’s happened to you so far. I bet you haven’t told her anything. I bet if she knew, she would just die.”
I did not reply. She closed her eyes and mumbled something under her breath. I sat there thinking and looking at her, waiting for her to say something else, but she didn’t. When I stood up, I saw she had fallen asleep. Quietly, I went to the door, opened it, looked back at her, and left to go to my own bedroom and think about all she had said. She had thrown my mind into a whirlpool of terrible thoughts.
Could I be pregnant? Would Tía Isabela send me back to Mexico like that, and would that break Abuela Anabela’s heart? What should I do about seeing Edward naked on the bed? Should I tell Tía Isabela? Would Sophia tell her, and then would she know I had seen it, too, and not said anything?
I was in such turmoil I didn’t think I would fall asleep, but somehow I did. I woke during the night and thought someone was in my room, standing by my door. It turned out to be just a shadow, but it put another shiver in my heart. I had a nightmare about it in which the ghost of Señor Dallas came to see me. He was very upset about both of his children but especially Sophia. He wanted me to help her, but he also warned me to be wary of her.
She did not come to breakfast as she had said she would. In fact, I did not see her until nearly one o’clock. Apparently, Jesse had stayed the night with Edward. In the morning after breakfast, he took Edward for a walk. I was afraid to speak to either of them and just watched them from a window in the living room as they strolled about the grounds. Edward still had his eyes bandaged. Jesse held Edward’s arm and guided him. They looked inseparable but also a little sad to me.
After I had some lunch, I went to my room to think about my preparations for the fiesta. Sophia came in, apologizing for not getting up earlier.
“I had a terrible headache this morning,” she said, rubbing her forehead to illustrate. “I didn’t think I’d ever get up. Did you take in the dress I gave you? Is it ready? The dress, the dress,” she repeated when I didn’t respond quickly enough.
“Sí, bueno.”
“Good. I can’t wait to see it on you. What time is Ignacio coming for you?”
“He comes at three.”
“Three! There’s not much time. Come on to my room. I’ll work on your hair at my vanity table, and we’ll experiment with some makeup, eye shadow, and lipstick. You can take a shower in my room first, if you want. Well?” she said when I didn’t move.
I started to get up.
“Don’t forget the dress,” she said, “and the shoes and the earrings.”
I gathered it all and followed her to her room, not without trepidation. This would be the first fiesta I had gone to outside my little village in Mexico. I wondered if the people there would be so much different from my people back home that I would feel as if I was with strangers, like a foreigner. Wearing Sophia’s beautiful and expensive dress, putting on makeup, and wearing expensive jewels would perhaps make me look alien, too different. And yet I had nothing good enough from my own wardrobe.
I did not like the way Sophia wanted my makeup, but if I made the smallest complaint or questioned anything, she went into a rage, telling me I was ungrateful and that she was just trying to help me look beautiful.
“You have to look American beautiful,” she said, “not Mexican. You’re my cousin.”
I had no idea what that meant, but I put on the eye shadow, lashes, rouge, and thick red lipstick. We brushed out my hair and had it lie differently from any style I had worn before. Afterward, she was dissatisfied with the way the dress fit me and made me wear one of her older bras, something she said raised my breasts and made my cleavage deeper. It was nearly three by the time we were finished. She said that because I looked so beautiful, she wanted to lend me a shawl for the night hours, when it would be cooler.
Then she and I went downstairs to wait for Ignacio. He called from the box at the gate, and Señora Flores pressed the button to open it for him. She came out to tell us Ignacio had arrived to pick me up. He was right on time. Sophia went with me to the front entrance, and we watched him drive up in his father’s pickup truck. There were still some pieces of lawn machinery in the back. Sophia laughed at the sight of it, but when Ignacio stepped out, dressed in his traditional fiesta outfit, she stopped laughing. He did look very handsome.
He wore a gold-embroidered black jacket with gold running down the sides of his pants, a white shirt with a red sash, shiny black boots, and an embroidered sombrero. His shoulders looked fuller and wider.
“He’s good-looking,” Sophia said. “Go have a good time.” She pushed me out, closing the door quickly as if she didn’t want him to see her.
I hurried out to greet him. I could see that the makeup, my changed hairstyle, and the expensive dress took him by surprise. He quickly smiled.
“Muy bonita,” he said, nodding at me.
“Gracias. Y usted, muy hermoso, Ignacio.”
He gazed at the front door. “Su tía? I should say hello, no?”
“She’s not home. No está aquí,” I said.
He nodded, looking a little relieved, and then moved quickly to the truck and opened the door for me. I glanced back at the house and thought I saw Jesse looking out of Edward’s bedroom window. The curtain closed quickly.
“I cleaned the seat,” Ignacio said, thinking that was why I was hesitating.
“Gracias,” I said, smiled, and got in quickly.
“To live in such a big house,” he said, looking at my aunt’s hacienda and shaking his head. “I’d get lost, I’m sure,” he said in Spanish.
I nodded.
I am lost in there, I thought, but I said nothing more about it. I was thinking about the fiesta now. I had not been here long, but all that had happened left me so insecure that I wasn’t confident about anything I was doing. I so longed for the warmth of family, for the love that Ignacio enjoyed. I wanted to be a part of this, because I knew it would be like going home. I only hoped that I would be accepted.
We went off the main highway onto a side road and then to his parents’ home. It was not hard to see that a fiesta was about to take place. The outside was decorated with streamers of red, green, and white, the colors of the Mexican flag, and balloons were tied to every place possible on the front of the small but well-kept house. Because his father owned a gardening and landscape company, there were especially pretty, well-trimmed hedges, bougainvillea along the walls and fences, a rich green lawn, and a yard filled with grapefruit, orange, and lemon trees.
Both sides of the street were already lined with the cars of their guests. Families were parking and walking to the front entrance when we pulled into the driveway. Everyone was dressed in traditional Mexican style, except me, of course. I was afraid to get out of the truck now that I saw the women and the young girls approaching the house. There were women in white cotton and lace campesinas, or peasant farmer dresses, dresses with embroidered flowers, and simple white shifts with loose tops we called huipiles. Everything looking hand-made. Both women and men wore sombreros. Most of the men wore pleated shirts with red or green scarfs and dark pants or red and green sashes.
I rea
lized that the simple clothes Abuela Anabela had packed in my old suitcase would have been more appropriate. Dressed as I was, I was sure I looked like a Mexican girl trying to put on airs. What was I thinking? Why did I let Sophia send me off like this? Was it more important to please her or to please Ignacio’s family and friends, people with whom I shared so much more? I wished this was my aunt’s home instead of the palace in which she lived and where we were all in different ways trapped.
“C’mon,” Ignacio urged.
“I feel foolish,” I said. “I am not dressed correctly.”
“Nonsense. You look beautiful,” he insisted. I sensed that if I had worn a sack, he would have said the same thing.
He stepped out of the truck, came around to open the door for me, and held out his hand. Reluctantly now, I took it and joined him. We entered the house, but the fiesta was set up in the backyard with the tables decorated. At the center of the yard, hanging from the branch of a tree, was a large, multicolored piñata shaped like a burro. Before the fiesta ended, all of the children would be blindfolded one at a time, spun around two or three times, and given a stick with which to strike the piñata. When it finally broke, the children would scramble for the toys that fell out.
Before I had even met any of Ignacio’s family, just the sight of these people prepared to enjoy the birthday fiesta and the music coming from five mariachis who played guitars, trumpets, and the accordion immediately made me feel at home. Ignacio told me the lead guitarist was none other than Mata’s father. They were playing and singing “Las Mañanitas,” a folk song traditionally sung on a birthday. No matter how many times I had heard it before, it had never sounded so beautiful.
Ignacio’s father, who was only an inch or so taller than he was but wider in the shoulders, stood at the entrance to the yard, handing out small clay pots to the men and women to wear around their necks. Into them was poured tequila. I could see Ignacio got his strong, manly good looks from his father, who had a full, coal-black mustache and striking black eyes, with firm lips and high cheekbones. His eyes narrowed when he saw us. The women who had already gathered looked our way as well. I was sure that I was the one attracting the attention, because I was the only one who didn’t look as if I belonged.
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