4. THE PERFECT FAMILY
THE PERFECT FAMILY
Isela’s version of a perfect family sits at the dinner table and they swallow their pride and their resentment and they pretend to understand what unconditional love could possibly mean.
They eat in silence and they toast to another meal.
The aroma of the herbs she’s pulled from the community garden to garnish the food settles in the air.
Dinner is cooked to perfection and no one can say otherwise.
She laughs at Alfonso’s stories, even when there’s no funny anecdote, no reason to throw her head back in delight.
She wants him to understand that she’s been trained in the language of placating a man.
In dumbing herself down. In holding her tongue.
She can disarm him with her body and by treating him like she thinks his mother would.
Isela’s version of a perfect family lives hundreds of miles away from anyone who might have the audacity to tell Alfonso stories of what she’d been like before she met him.
Isela’s lies were plentiful, flimsy, and lacked afterthought.
She blurted them out as though she had no choice but to say them.
Her stories meandered toward the absurd.
It got to the point where she began to question which versions of her past self were real or made up.
It’s not that she felt guilty. The idea of consequence was never on her mind.
She wasn’t capable of shame, but she understood that chisme could spread like a thunderstorm, so the family moved from Texas to New Mexico.
The baby can’t say much about Isela’s mothering as she’s barely babbling.
Isela wonders when this child of hers will stab her in the back.
What lies will this girl tell? Isela bottle feeds her while she describes the celestial movements of the planets to the little being.
Every three hours, they wake together, Isela drenched in sweat, with clumps of her hair cemented to her pillowcase.
The baby gets fed, over and over, and then she cries, over and over.
Delirious and numb, Isela wonders if it will ever end.
She finds herself outside of the apartment complex with the baby in her arms, rocking back and forth.
The thought of leaving the baby at the base of an oak tree as an offering overwhelms her.
She steps inside and rocks the baby by the glow of the TV, but she also warns the baby not to make her do it.
Do not make her a destroyer of worlds. The baby says nothing and Isela likes it that way.
The baby has Alfonso’s eyes. They almost sparkle, but this moves nothing in Isela.
There are mornings when the baby reaches for her, but Isela doesn’t pick her up.
Instead, she gives her a pacifier and plays oldies on her record player.
When the baby wails, the fluctuation of phantom contractions echo in Isela's belly so she locks herself in the coat closet furthest away from the baby’s crib.
She hides until the baby stops. She daydreams about clawing her own eyes out.
She fantasizes about dancing barefoot in the rain until flood waters take her, swift and violent, and most of all, the water could make her disappear forever.
Sometimes, Isela goes out at night and wanders under the gleam of street lamps begging for something to take her. A demon. A ghost. La Llorona.
It never happens so she settles for screaming into her pillow or going outside and sticking her head under the deep end of the apartment pool knowing she won’t drown, but she could try.