Chapter 31
It’s true. It pleased me to assume the role of Louise’s daughter.
Just as it pleased me, gratified something very deep inside of me, to call myself a housewife.
My resentment toward my mother had long ago distilled into a generalized contempt for any woman not able to hold on to a man, too ugly or needy or foolish to keep him.
Once abandoned to my father, I quickly learned to protect his ego and mine by being everything my mother had failed to be.
I cooked elaborate meals, cleaned and rearranged the house.
When he returned from work, we would sit in the spotless living room with its flowers in glass vases as I listened to him expound on whatever interested him—the variety of grapes used to make the wine he’d opened, the director of the movie he had chosen for us to watch later, the female colleague whom he despised—nodding eagerly, assuming his interests as my own, allowing the veneer of our shared lives to displace what had been before.
And when a junior partner at his firm wanted to talk to me in a certain way, or the father of one of my friends, or one of my teachers, I knew how to respond.
How to surprise them, saying coolly, yes, I knew how pretty I was; yes, let’s.
I see now that I related to my life with Tom, and my new life in Mexico, in much the same way, attempting to pick and choose among its beauty and ugliness, hiding whatever was unacceptable in it or in me.
In the scattering of cigarette butts and broken glass and used condoms beneath the chipped Madonna of the shrine near my house, I doggedly saw only battered elegance and civility.
Not the shabbiness of the men who had stood there slowly becoming drunk; the couples who had hurriedly fucked with little pleasure, their desire fueled less by love than by anger and hopelessness, afterward finishing off the cheap bottle and letting it slip through cum-wet fingers with the same nonchalant malice with which the little boy had flung the dead snake over his shoulder.
I think of the woman I overheard as a young girl, being raped or giving birth in a bathroom stall in the Back Bay bus station as I waited for my father.
The sounds she made told a story more efficiently and with more power than any words could have.
How that night, my lonely father lay on top of my covers to warm me, and beneath his awkward weight and wine-scented breath, I became so still that I imagined I had made a part of myself disappear.
Yet I had not permitted myself to dwell on these moments, to write about them in the notebook Louise had given me.
I refused to permit that part of creation that is ugly, that is covered in shit and blood and wails as it is born.
I still wanted to be the author of only beautiful things: beautiful children; beautiful houses; a beautiful, youthful body striding in high-heeled sandals along the Cuesta, smiling at all I passed.
As much as I denied the ugliness of my origins, I remained their victim, incapable of either owning or discarding what I was stupid enough to imagine I had turned to ash.
Louise said: You should leave the children with María more often. You need to be writing. How about tomorrow? We’ll drive to the country. I’ll take my camera.
Yes, I unfailingly answered her. And then I would ferry her around, writing nothing, cowed and largely silent as she spoke of what she saw, interpreting our surroundings for me. In these moments, I saw myself for what I was: grasping and meek, careful to never displease her.
And yet the simple fact of the notebook, and the prints I stared at, had opened up a portal.
In bed at night, after setting aside whatever book I was reading, after lovemaking, when Tom slept, long-repressed images descended like an arm, shoving, imploring.
Words arrived with fevered urgency, strung together with the clipped rhythm of my childhood, the color of its landscape.
Certain scenes began to assert themselves so insistently that one night I got up out of bed and began to write.
And though the content was ugly, the sentences poured out with the same abandon and joy as they had that night at Louise’s.
This time, it wasn’t someone else’s story.
It was only mine. I wrote of the afternoon when the boy Leo showed his penis to a group of us walking home from school.
The pink denuded look of it that appalled me.
How, after he’d shown and we’d looked, he and all the other children ran back to their decrepit homes.
Me, no. I walked to the edge of the ravine where he had stood gripping himself, then made myself lean beyond it, staring at the black crusts of snow, making an inventory of the trash scattered there.
Broken appliances, soiled clothing and diapers, food wrappers.
Eventually my gaze settled on a child’s broken bicycle.
It had no seat, only a rusted pole thrusting upward where a child would sit.
I showed this vignette to Louise. For days, I waited anxiously for her reply. When it finally came, we were sitting across from one another in the hidden café—that dark, elegant space where I was received warmly now, always by the name she had given me: Bienvenida, Senorita Mia. ?Qué desea tomar?
“Bravo, Mia.” Gesturing at the pages resting in her lap. “It’s good.”
I flushed with joy, and even welled with tears. “It is? Really?”
“Really, really good. You’re becoming so much more than the pretty girl I first met. In these pages is the truth that we are all fundamentally alone. We all must fend for ourselves, make our own realities. Mommy will not make it all better.”
At that phrase, Mommy will not make it all better, the tears overspilled hotly. She had uttered it sneeringly, in a way that seemed to locate blame not with the inadequate mother who cannot comfort her child, but with the child who, in a pitiful moment of weakness, allows herself to expect it.