Chapter 27
I awoke early and exhausted, Tom asleep beside me. As always after those dreams, I felt exposed: I was incapable of being a good mother; I was vulgar, unworthy of love. Stop, I commanded myself. Don’t be pathetic. Don’t let her reach her shadow into this house, this day.
I took a long shower. I washed myself until my skin squeaked beneath my fingers.
When the children awoke, I bathed and dressed them.
I combed Henry’s unruly hair and braided Ida’s into two trim rows almost as neatly as María could.
“Darlings, let me fix you breakfast.” It was Sunday, María’s day off.
I served them pancakes with the maple syrup they loved that is mostly corn syrup, the only kind you could buy here.
I kissed them as they ate, their sticky cheeks and lips.
I inhaled their breath, Ida’s a little fetid, Henry’s milky sweet.
I stood behind Henry on his wooden stool at the sink, caressingly rinsing his hands, like plump pink newborn animals.
Tom was still in bed, sheepishly reading. I bent to kiss him, saying I would take the children on an outing. “Really?” he said, pleased. Since having them, it was the greatest conceivable luxury, to be fully alone.
I took them to get pastries in town, to the playground at Parque Juárez, then to Louise’s, as she had proposed, where they searched the terrace for eggs and took turns painting at the easel Allan had once used, perhaps Navarro, who knew?
Louise said nothing about our previous day’s lunch, and neither did I.
Neither did I feel compelled to ask about her past life in San Miguel, how she knew Bill.
I sharpened my gaze on the present: Look at all this beauty!
Look at what I’ve made of my life, what I’m giving my children!
Toward evening, I called Tom. He sounded drowsily happy, having spent the day reading and doodling in his sketchbook.
It was great to have a break from the kids, but he hoped it hadn’t been too tiring for me, having them all day?
I assured him it hadn’t. In fact, why not continue to enjoy himself?
He could stroll into town for dinner or a drink.
The kids and I would fend for ourselves.
There was no food to speak of at Louise’s.
At seven, we walked to the neighborhood I’d driven through with Tom before we moved here, imagining how it might change when the building project was complete.
A cluttered tiendita, a crumbling church, two metal benches set before a stone wall.
Louise knew of a woman who sold tamales from her stoop.
We brought them back in plastic containers and ate sitting on the living room floor, Louise with her bad leg extended before her.
Afterward, I spread out a blanket for Ida and Henry, who lay close together, quietly conferring, as Louise and I sat on the sheepskin-covered bed.
“I love when they get along.”
Ida was whispering intently in Henry’s ear, her arm draped casually over his shoulder.
“I’ll bet you were innocent like that.”
“Right.” I snorted. Making my voice into a crude imitation of Louise’s, I said, “You don’t know the haahf, darling.”
“Bitch!” She laughed; it was the way things were between us now, the teasing intimacy, the sudden deep claims on one another. “You’d better be careful, pretending to be someone else.”
“Or what?”
She took my hand, rubbing it along the palm. “I practice chiromancy. I see you don’t know the word. I can expose your character with humiliating accuracy.”
“With what?” I was laughing.
“Oh, it’s just something Mark Twain said after visiting a famous palm reader.”
“Don’t tell me you knew him, too.”
“Don’t be daft. What do I look like, a hundred? Here, I’ll recite a poem, see if you can guess what it means. ‘When your hands go out, love, toward mine, what do they bring me flying? Why did they stop at my mouth—’ ” She lifted my hand to her lips, and I pulled it away, saying:
“I love how you do that.”
“Hmm?”
“Recite poetry.”
“Can’t you?” Louise said, as though it were as common as tying your shoes, and I was momentarily chagrined, thinking, I’ll learn some. “That poem was Neruda’s, whom I did know. Well, met. A painter I knew introduced us in Italy.”
“Come on, you’re kidding me—Neruda?”
But even if I didn’t strictly believe her stories, I sensed it would be stingy of me, an admission of my own smallness, to regard them as meaningless or devoid of emotional truth.
Sometimes, now, she tempered her bluster with stories of degradation and loss.
She had been a foster child. Her mother was a whore and an addict.
“This fake indebtedness to people, blood is thicker than water, what nonsense! I made myself from nobody and nothing. When I stand at the podium accepting my award, I’ll start by saying I have no one to thank. ”
When she finally read my palm, it revealed I was a fire person, very potent—although that formidable power, which might otherwise be turned to the creation of art, was frequently hobbled by a pervasive need to please.
“What the hell?” Laughing, pulling away my hand. “I thought you were supposed to tell my future.”
“What, You will live a long and prosperous life?” She scoffed. “Anyway, only fools believe in these arbitrary distinctions, the future and the past. It’s all just life. And life is character.”
These sweeping statements; the assessing way she lifted her chin, steadily regarding me along the length of her handsomely reconstructed nose, the nose that once, I kept remembering, had shattered to bits along with the rest of her.
These were the moments I felt closest to true affection for Louise, even love.
“Where were you?” Tom asked when we finally arrived back home.
“Only Louise’s.”
“Not the whole day?” He had a look of concern, disapproval.
But he was grateful, too, for the time alone. He’d been smoking a cigar on the upper terrace when we arrived, his skin cool as I kissed him hello. His clothes smelled like smoldering leaves—a smell you might catch from far away on a chilly fall night.