Chapter 22
The cold dread that had burst in me persisted on the drive home. It prickled my skin, seeped through my pores, like the feeling right before you become sick. The car full of groceries, the children whispering in back. As we were turning into the driveway, Henry asked, “Why does she call you Mia?”
“It’s a nickname,” Ida answered for me.
“It’s ugly,” Henry said, Ida refuting him:
“It’s nice. It’s a term of endearment.”
Where had she learned that phrase? I wondered, at the same time thinking desperately: It has to be perfect when Louise comes, the house, the food, everything.
As luck would have it, María was still at home, long past the time she usually left.
I found her standing on the kitchen countertop, the dishes stacked around her, dusting the topmost shelves.
These depths of cleanliness any normal person would never think to execute.
Quietly setting my bags down, I addressed her, eager to speak with her about tomorrow’s comida.
“Ay, senora,” she laughed, starting and clutching her chest. “Me sorprendiste.” She seemed unusually happy to see me, almost girlishly embarrassed as she climbed down, wiping her hands over the shapeless dress she always wore.
At her warmth, I was overcome by an urge to fall into her arms, hide my face in the warm folds of her neck, and cry.
It caught me completely off guard. I bit my cheek, swallowing back my tears, deriding myself for being weak.
I’ll give her an extra big tip this week, I thought.
Each week, we left an envelope of bills on the kitchen table for her to distribute as she saw fit between herself; her daughter Rocío, who helped with the cleaning; and her brother Antonio, who occasionally tended the plants.
As I was thinking all of this, before I could speak to her about Louise coming for comida, she began to tell me about an event “in the future.” “Es un bautismo,” she said several times; it took a while longer before I understood that the baptism was for her grandson Kevin, Rocío’s son.
Rocío had brought the baby to the house with her once, allowing Ida and Henry to take turns holding and touching him before setting him to sleep in the laundry room as she finished her work.
María repeated his name now to make sure I had understood, pronouncing it in rounded syllables, Kay-veen.
She gave the date: “El segundo domingo de diciembre.” There was to be a church service, followed by a big party at her home.
“It’s a lot of work for you,” I said, adding that it wasn’t necessary for her to clean our house that week if she needed the time; we would still pay her as always.
No, no, she shook her head, she wanted to work for us, it was her life. “Quiero que sean mis invitados,” she said, searching my face.
Only then did I realize she was inviting us. I again felt I might cry, and to cover my emotion began to speak all in a rush: Of course we would come, claro que sí, she was so kind to invite us.
“Está bien, senora.” Smiling, she lifted the bags of produce onto the counter.
Though it was over an hour past the time she usually left, she began to wash everything with great care, using the special drops to purify the water.
I wanted to tell her no, don’t bother; she should get home to her family.
But it comforted me deeply, and so I stood there in silence allowing her to.
When she drew out the papaya, she held it up as the man had, praising it as though it were an infant: “Qué bonita está, senora.”
I told her to take it. “Es un regalito,” I insisted, a little gift.
Shyly she took it in her hand and left to get her coat. I lingered in the kitchen, a momentary peace engulfing me at the sight of everything I’d bought gleamingly clean and neatly laid out. Bowl after bowl of the most beautiful produce you’ve ever seen.
But when Tom arrived a half an hour later, my panic returned stronger than before, spiraling off in all directions.
Louise would disapprove of the house, in some obscure way its beauty.
She would criticize our neighborhood’s pretentiousness, or bring up her own, referencing the hated building project that I’d never mentioned Tom was overseeing.
And what if she wore the bracelet, which she did nearly every day?
Or called me Mia? What would I say to Tom?
Beneath these articulable fears lay something more amorphous and pervasive.
A fear that our closeness was an illusion; that, in the course of her being here, I would be exposed to Tom or—worse—myself, and so lose her.
Night arrived. I tried to console myself with routine.
I bathed Ida and Henry, sat on the floor between their beds reading aloud from a chapter book.
I grew impatient turning the pages. Sweat pricked the back of my neck.
I kept checking my watch. As soon as I left their room, I ran upstairs, thinking there might be an email from Louise.
There was nothing, and so I distracted myself by looking at pictures of movie stars with hair I liked and houses for sale in Minneapolis in higher and higher price ranges that we could never afford because none appealed to me; even the million-dollar homes were tasteless and crass.
Only after a half hour did I remember that I had agreed to a “date” with Tom, to have a glass of wine and make love. Idiot!
I ran my hands through my hair, hurried down the stairs to our bedroom. He was propped against a pillow, his shirt off, an opened bottle of wine on the bedside table.
“What kept you so long?”
“Was I long?”
He cocked his head, seeming to stare straight through me. “I was starting to think you forgot.”
“No, no, not at all! It’s just, there was an email from Jessica.
” Jessica was the neighbor whose daughter had sent Henry the postcard, about whom I’d often complained to Tom that she was needy, always demanding reassurance, whining when too much time had elapsed between communications.
“Actually, I’m thinking of changing my email,” I said.
“Seems a bit drastic.”
I didn’t answer. I had sat down onto the edge of the bed.
Mechanically he began to reach under my shirt, unfasten my bra.
He leaned forward speaking my name into my ear, the wash of his breath repellent to me.
I flinched. “Do you need a glass of wine?” he asked, and I noted the verb with irritation, as if I was so cold, so damaged, that I had to be drunk to have sex with my husband.
He was continuing with a kind of doggedness, lifting my shirt over my head, caressing my arms, murmuring things.
I leaned back against the pillows in a posture of submission.
I smiled to him. But when he lowered his mouth to kiss me, I averted my face, sighing impatiently as if to say, Let’s go, stop panting over me; guilty as he awkwardly entered me, humiliated by my dryness, telling myself to breathe, to relax, don’t be such a fucking bitch.
There is no one but you, Tom, I silently recited—absurd, melodramatic thought—telling myself, You lied about an email, so what? The truth isn’t even worth mentioning.
I took a breath, exhaling deeply. I closed my eyes.
I reached between my legs, tracing the place where we met, trying to rise to the challenge of pleasure, to arrive into it, because to feel nothing seemed a second betrayal.
But I could see on his face, grimacing slightly, there wasn’t time.
And so I said the words instead, “There’s no one but you,” knowing it would hasten the end.
“Tom, oh, Tom, there’s no one but you,” I said, grimly satisfied when he shuddered against me, his heavy weight slackened and gone still.
In the expanding silence, I told myself I would make it up to both of us; we would have the true sex later.
Once he’d rested. Then I would kiss him without reservation—his mouth and fingers, his manhood that had already been inside me, patiently and slowly, tasting and taking him everywhere.
And when we were finally spent, we would lie awake like we used to before marriage and kids.
I would confess everything to him. My failed attempts at writing; my restless dissatisfaction, teetering on self-loathing; how at the market I had felt like a woman in a new way, and afterward wanted to cry in María’s arms, to accept love as I never permitted myself to.
He had begun sweeping his hands beneath the bedcovers.
I knew he was searching for his underwear, without which he couldn’t sleep peacefully.
When, moments later, he curled away, for minutes, I stared with a sense of rejection and umbrage at his broad shoulders, damp with sweat; the base of his skull; his blond hair shorn short. “Tom?”
“Hmm?”
“No, nothing.”