Chapter 8
The morning after my encounter with Louise, I awoke with a surprising sense of energy and purpose.
I had a sudden, palpable desire to create—what?
Something brimming with beauty and authenticity that I alone was capable of making.
What form this might take, I had no idea.
Returning home with the groceries, on a whim, I stopped into the dusty tiendita near our house and bought a cheap spiral notebook.
But Ida, amused by the cover art—a tacky photo of a wet cat climbing out of a cook pot—claimed it before I had even written my name inside.
Since the morning he left, Tom and I had been emailing several times a day.
Without articulating the intention either to Tom or myself, I began to focus my creative energies into these notes.
Mostly they were about things I’d seen on my walks to and from school that struck me as almost painfully beautiful.
Stray dogs and gilded fountains. The clear sky, drained and pure.
Rows of painted doors hiding lush courtyards smelling faintly of decay.
More soulless meetings, Tom wrote with characteristic brevity. Cold already. Wish I was there.
Incredible light today, I wrote back, playing at adopting his syntax.
Being here is like standing naked against a white wall.
I reread that line in satisfaction several times, though I vaguely suspected it wasn’t mine.
Maybe I’d read it in a novel, or was it something Louise had said?
For a moment, I considered telling Tom about her, then decided not to.
There wasn’t really anything to tell, and in haste, I typed out a closing: Miss you, though I didn’t much.
I was content in the space our separation afforded, happy crafting and polishing these small compositions.
On Friday morning, we were late again. After Ida didn’t appear for breakfast, I had found her at the bathroom mirror lifting her long blond hair above her ears and sticking bobby pins into it at random angles, a fierce expression on her face.
“Ida, it’s time to leave for school.”
“I can’t. I need to make it so my hair looks short.”
At first, I was gentle, patient. “I don’t think that will work, darling.”
“It will if you help me!” she yelled.
We went back and forth. At first, I tried to accommodate her demands, pinning her hair underneath so that it mimicked a bob.
But no, she wanted it to look like Justin’s, a boy from our block in Minneapolis with short, elaborately feathered hair.
I guessed then what this was about. A few weeks before, as we were leaving the courtyard after school, a girl in Ida’s grade had suddenly touched my shoulder, saying in heavily accented English that failed to conceal her ridicule, “Miss, is she a girl?”
I felt Ida stiffen beside me. The child’s mother reddened, saying loudly, “What are you saying? Of course she is, don’t be stupid.”
“Then why doesn’t she have earrings?” the girl retorted with feigned wonder, after which the mother, glancing anxiously at me and laughing to cover her embarrassment, whisked her away.
For days afterward, I waited uneasily for Ida to ask to have her ears pierced.
Now I thought: Rather than belong, she’s decided to wage war.
I was tempted to admire her ferocity, even though I knew it would only make trouble for her in the end.
In the mirror, Ida was still twisting her hair into strange shapes, turning her face critically to one side and then the other, and I said lightly, “It simply won’t work, my angel. You’d need a haircut.”
“Is there time for one this morning?”
“No.”
“Why not?” she demanded.
I took a slow breath, trying to master my frustration. In moments like this, I was thankful to have Henry. I thought: At least one of them won’t grow up to despise me.
Throughout this exchange, María had been passing back and forth along the hallway, carrying stacks of fresh sheets, pausing to comb Henry’s unruly hair with her thick fingers, fetching a second white shirt from the laundry room because he’d slightly dirtied the first in the course of breakfast, now kneeling gingerly before him to lift his sweater over his head.
“Senor Haynree, ?le puedo ayudar?” Although she spoke no English, I had an irrational panic about being overheard.
A preemptive embarrassment that I would have to explain, in my rudimentary Spanish, complex dynamics I felt helpless to define.
In the mirror, Ida’s mouth had congealed into an ugly scowl.
I imagined grabbing her shoulders, shouting at her, Enough, nobody gives a shit how you look!
In the sudden charge of the moment María’s calm felt almost confrontational, her mothering of us all a thing I measured myself against and came up short.
“?Todo bien, senora?”
“Vamos tarde,” I told her in a tone that, despite my vague resentment, was an appeal—Help me, do something!—to which she merely sighed, “Ay, sí, senora, es verdad,” smiling placidly.
Returning my attention to Ida, I crouched down to her eye level. “Please, we have to go,” I begged.
“To get my hair cut?” she said.
With an effort that made my hands shake, I swallowed down my fury, the desperation that only one’s children can provoke.
I don’t even remember how I finally cajoled her into the car, what I promised her in return for going to school.
Only bottoming out in the topes, the huge bumps that are meant to slow traffic.
And Henry, imploring me with a note almost of terror in his voice, “Hurry, Mommy! We’re going to be locked out!
” Ida looking out the window, saying loudly, “Good, I want to be.” As we were crossing the narrow bridge, I saw the beat-up pickup truck belonging to Fabiola, the woman who had given us a ride that first day Tom was gone.
Briefly our eyes met as we passed one another.
Through the windshield I saw her laugh and shake her head, mouthing the work fuck.
Then parking badly. Kneeling in the courtyard, exhorting them—“Run! I’ll see you soon!
Try to have a good day!”—full of pity and love at seeing them scatter across the grass toward their separate classrooms. The headmaster’s assistant was already coming in her cheap heels, her huge ring of keys jingling before her.
It was as I was standing to leave that I heard the voice behind me.
“Here you are, at last.”
Louise, smiling at me when I turned. I’d never seen her here in the morning and wondered, with a quiver of happy unease, if she had come only to find me. Embarrassed, I smoothed my disheveled hair. In the chaos of the morning, I’d not even pulled a comb through it.
“What a nice surprise,” I said, stepping through the gate, the assistant closing the door behind me and then pausing as the latch caught, the key turned loudly.
I laughed. “It’s still incredible to me that in a country where lateness is practically a universal trait, they would lock you out of school.
Can you imagine the uproar in the States? ”
“Mexicans have an entirely different sense of justice.”
“How do you mean?”
“They accept that it doesn’t exist.”
I laughed more genuinely, at ease now.
Louise was rummaging in her big black bag. “I have something for you,” she said.
“But why, what is it?” I said, flustered.
She was already handing it to me, wrapped in beautifully understated paper.
Or, rather, it was wrapped, I saw, in brown paper that she’d decorated with black line drawings whose significance I quickly understood: two faces, one with eyes closed, the other with eyes open, adrift above a park bench; a peach; a cup and saucer; the irregular ring of the bracelet.
It was the sort of thing I might have done for Tom in the early days of our courtship, or for my children, in part because no one had ever done anything like that for me.
“Open it,” she said.
It was a plain black leather-bound notebook. Inside the cover, she’d written imperatively, in jagged script: Get to work.
I was touched, and not by anything so banal as her encouragement.
Encouragement, after all, is cheap. Tom had encouraged me, saying I didn’t need to work; I could do whatever made me happy.
My mother had, too, if only because that is what mothers tell children, You can grow up to be anything you want, even as I trailed behind her like a tiny empty suitcase.
“Louise, I don’t know what to say.”
“It’s nothing.”
“No, really. I love it.” We had turned and were walking mechanically in the direction of town. “I have the car this morning,” I said, suddenly remembering. “I could give you that ride.”
“Only I’m going to La Gruta.” Seeing my blank expression, “Don’t tell me you’ve never been to the hot springs? But you must, you have to come, I won’t take no for an answer.”