Chapter 30
Aside from this incident and a few inconsequential spats with Tom or Ida or Louise, it was a time of overwhelming contentment.
It seemed as though Fate was smiling on me; nothing bad could befall me.
I had begun Spanish lessons two mornings a week in a beautiful old building on Mesones.
I would save some small bit of shopping until after my lesson so that I could practice the things I’d learned with José Luis, with Enrique, the produce seller’s handsome son, laughing, flirting, spinning tales of my life in various tenses.
I took Henry to the tiendas or the covered market after picking him up at noon, chatting with the other housewives as they ruffled Henry’s hair and offered him treats, asked him where he attended school.
?Vasconcelos! ?La mejor escuela de San Miguel! Has de ser muy inteligente.
Despite his excellent Spanish, Henry was shy when speaking with adults.
Only with María did the children speak Spanish more freely—perhaps because María was so profoundly illiterate, unable even to copy down telephone numbers when someone called, much less their spoken message.
In this and every imaginable way, she was an unintimidating presence, a wholly benign and loving force.
Every day, she ironed their uniforms, made their beds, and tidied their room, nestling Ida’s stuffed animals beside the pillows, arranging Henry’s action figures with immaculate care, posing them in various states of battle.
Some afternoons, in the empty hours before it was time to pick up Ida and have comida, Henry would play at a little fountain in our neighborhood, disused and overgrown.
He liked to do this alone. It was an adventure for which María packed him a snack consisting entirely of sweets that she wrapped in a handkerchief and tied to the end of a long stick Henry had found on one of our romps through the botanical garden near our house.
He liked to gallop with the stick straddled between his legs and pretend in was a horse.
“Eres muy guapo, Senor Haynree,” she called after him. “Eres un vaquero.”
“You’re sure it’s all right for him to go alone?” I asked, less out of concern for his safety than at being judged negligent, as I surely would have in the States.
“Ay, sí, senora,” she sighed. “Todos los ninos lo hacen—they are little men.”
I laughed and nodded my agreement, somehow charmed by the chauvinistic sentiment and the sugared treats that had formerly been anathema, things to vigilantly defend my son against, just as I was charmed by the mothers in the school courtyard and the market who flashed their vividly colored nails, the air tinkling with their laughter and the loud ringtones of their phones.
In the States, my interactions with other mothers had been characterized by a certain wariness; a shared sense that as mothers of young children our lives were on hold, but that one day a more remarkable existence might be resumed or invented.
Whereas here people were not merely resigned to their immobility but content.
It made sense to me, at last, that María didn’t sit with us at mealtimes.
There was a certain comfort in knowing who you were, where you belonged.
One morning, I expressed some of these views to Louise, declaring that the constant striving in the States produced only dissatisfaction.
I was standing in her kitchen making coffee, warming the milk and the cinnamon.
“It’s nice to be somewhere where ‘women’s work’ and the importance of family are still valued. ”
Louise was appalled. “The absolute stupidity! Women of your generation don’t know how good you have it! As if all these freedoms you enjoy didn’t have to be fought for, or couldn’t still be lost.”
It was difficult to take her seriously, not to smile derisively at Louise’s diatribe while we stood in a beautiful room with music on the turntable, cups of coffee in our hands.
Her invective took on an entirely different meaning when she repeated it several days later.
We were having a drink with Hector at the café in the Fábrica.
They had spent the morning hanging a new show of a female artist from the DF, and using this as her starting point, Louise made a sneering reference to “Mia’s nonsense about women’s work the other day,” after which she repeated almost word for word her speech about freedoms won through ongoing battles.
Only this time, she prefaced it with a smile, a little laugh high in her throat, saying, “Women of my daughter’s generation… ”
It was clear in the way Hector regarded me, lifting his eyebrows in affectionate complicity about Louise’s militancy, that he believed I was the daughter in question.
What’s more, I was certain it was an intentional miscue on Louise’s part.
She seemed to be assessing my reaction as she spoke, her gaze meeting mine in pleasure and slight curiosity, as if daring me to correct her.
“I’m proud to be a housewife, a mother,” I parried back. “Why shouldn’t I be? As work goes, it’s as honorable as any other.”
“Don’t be a fool, Mia.”
I caught Hector’s eye across the table and smiled. I said lightly, “You’re right. I’m really pretty stupid. Good thing I’m so attractive.”
She stared for a long uninterrupted moment as if she were undressing me—the way a governess might undress her ward when she had tramped through mud, cold and controlled and disdaining, You foolish girl, stop wasting so much of my time.
Still, when the check came, Louise reached for it, then drew out her wallet, ostentatiously counting the bills and laying them one at a time onto the table in a show of ceremony, as though making a public declaration of her maternal care.